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[…]
Tag Archives: Black Business District
Baseball in Walnut Hills: Manggrum’s Drug Store, the Recreation Commission, and Black Sports
Click here to see more information about Black Baseball in Walnut Hills From the 1870s for at least a century, baseball was the national pastime. Everyone from school kids to mature adults played, watched and followed the game. The professional majors excluded Black players into the 1940s and 1950s, but there were Colored teams at[…]
Walnut Hills (Melrose) YMCA
With the closing of the Melrose YMCA for a remodeling that will leave most of the space in the hands of other non-profit organizations, we look back at the history of the buildings on that lot – and their occupants – as a reflection of the history of the block and the neighborhood. Known originally[…]
Major Savings and Loan
Major Savings and Loan, located primarily at Gilbert and Lincoln Avenues, was the longest-lived African American Savings and Loan in Cincinnati, operating from 1921 until 1986. Savings and Loans, earlier called Building and Loans, were the primary savings institutions for most people, and the source of most mortgage loans, during the middle half of 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[…]
Black Business District – Information from Green Books
The Negro Motorist Green Book was published from 1937 thru 1964 (with a few years missing for WW2). It listed places friendly to Black travelers and covered the entire country. Cincinnati was included beginning in 1939. In the 2017-2018 school year, students from a UC/CCP class on African-American History (taught by Brynn Thomas) went thru all[…]
Thatcher’s Fish and Poultry
Ernest and Georgia Thatcher came to Cincinnati in 1929, a young African American couple from Kentucky hoping to make a better life together. His construction boss, a white man, agreed to help the Thatchers start a business in 1933; he paid their first few month’s rent on a storefront at 1015 Lincoln Avenue, and lent[…]
