At our November, 2020, virtual meeting, Geoff Sutton presented research on how Cincinnati and Walnut Hills responded to the Great Migration. This research grew out of his work with 4th graders at Frederick Douglass School and Spencer Center. Using paintings by Jacob Lawrence, Geoff identified the institutions, community work and attitudes that made our neighborhood[…]
Category Archives: Education
Sadie Samuels: What Success Looked Like for a Black Woman in the early Twentieth Century
Sadie Samuels was born in 1892 in Cincinnati’s West End. In the 1900 census the household included the eight-year-old Sadie, an African-American girl; her grandfather Thomas Young, a wounded veteran of the US Colored Troops during the Civil War; her father James who worked on the railroad; her mother Margaret and her baby brother James,[…]
A brief history of the Frederick Douglass School buildings
1855: Dangerfield Earley’s School Before the Civil War many African Americans settled in Cincinnati. The city had a separate system of Colored Public Schools for their children. The suburb of Walnut Hills also had a private African American school run by Dangerfield Earley, minister of the First Church founded in 1856. The Rev. Earley held[…]
Frederick Douglass and Spencer Center Fourth Grade History Club Spring 2018
Fourth graders from Frederick Douglass School and the Spencer Center have a combined history club. The Douglass kids stay after school; always start with a snack and a half hour of history before we go to Spencer. Then we walk over to the Spencer which is still is in session and work together with the[…]
Dr. Loretta C. Manggrum
Loretta Cessor, born in 1896 in Gallipolis, Ohio, had African American, Irish and Native American ancestry. Her mother was a teacher who played the piano and the guitar. Loretta proved a natural pianist, playing in her Sunday School from the age of six, and in her church while still a child. At about 15 she[…]
Ida Mae Rhodes
Ida Mae Rhodes was born in 1899 and lived until 2000 – 101 years. She went to the University of Cincinnati; most records show her graduating in 1919. Yet the university bulletin for 1919-1920 shows her as a junior, and in 1920 she became the president of the first African American sorority on the campus.[…]
Donald Spencer, Douglass School teacher
Donald Spencer was born in Cincinnati in 1915. He went to public schools and graduated from Walnut Hills High School in 1932. At Walnut Hills, Donald worked to ensure that African-American students could attend the Junior-Senior Prom. He then went to the University of Cincinnati where he first graduated with a degree in Chemistry in 1936,[…]
The Great Migration
In the nineteenth century, both before and after the Civil War, most African Americans lived in the rural South. Cincinnati had a relatively high African American population for a Northern city at about 5% in the early twentieth century, and the population grew by nearly a third in the first decade of that century to[…]
Frederick Douglass Elementary School 2008
In 2008 Cincinnati Public Schools built the fifth Frederick Douglass School. The facility is a better fit for younger students than the 1980 structure. With classrooms clustered around open spaces, it allows more modern teaching methods. The “Panther Pride” at the school continues the tradition of educational excellence for students in the largely African American[…]
Grace Smith Slade
James and Mary Smith lived in the African American settlement near the Elm Street Colored School, on Maple Street (later 2912 Park Avenue). They were within a few blocks of Dangerfield Earley’s home. In 1875 their daughter Grace was born, the second of five children in a home that “maintained the ideals of culture and[…]
