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 History
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[…]
Lincoln Avenue in 1870: What did women do all day?
See all the topics about Lincoln Avenue in the 1870’s and 1880’s. We have been looking at the Census data from 1870 and 1880 to understand the people who lived on what became Lincoln Avenue in 1877. In 1870, the primary occupation listed for both the Black majority and the white minority of both women[…]
Lincoln Avenue in 1870: What did men do all day?
We have been looking at the Census data from 1870 and 1880 to understand the people who lived on what became Lincoln Avenue in 1877. The last post looked at women in 1870; this one will look at men. The most striking gender difference comes in the variety of occupations assigned by the census taker[…]
Scene near Walnut Hills: Abraham Lincoln Monument 1967
Our previous post looked at the Abraham Lincoln monument in Avondale, both today and when it was constructed in 1902. The most famous incident at the monument in living memory came in the summer of 1967, beginning on June 11. The site was the center of the revolt or civil unrest on the part of[…]
Scene near Walnut Hills: Abraham Lincoln Monument
Venturing on a walk from Walnut Hills to our neighbors in Avondale, I passed the Abraham Lincoln Memorial at the corner of Rockdale and Reading, outside South Avondale School. The scene was colorful, solemn, appropriate, and extremely moving to me. A monument and a corner that has seen much controversy over the years, it has[…]
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,[…]
Baseball Venues in Walnut Hills
Click here to see more information about Black Baseball in Walnut Hills The Deer Creek Commons, built over a large culvert down the valley between Gilbert Avenue and Reading Road, included the greatest amateur baseball venue in Cincinnati during the first half of the twentieth century. Deer Creek Commons was the home field for the[…]
Baseball Venues: Walnut Hills Ashland Park
Click here to see more information about Black Baseball in Walnut Hills The parks plans of the progressive era not only resulted in the construction of large facilities like the Deer Creek Commons considered in the last post; Cincinnati also set about building a number of small neighborhood parks. In 1911 the new Park Board[…]
Jennie Jackson DeHart and the Fisk Jubilee Singers
Jennie Jackson sang in the original Fish Jubilee Singers beginning in 1871. In 1885 she married the Nashville preacher Andrew J. DeHart, and the couple promptly returned to DeHart’s hometown of Cincinnati. Jennie Jackson Dehart continued her concert career with variations on the Jubilee Singers as her husband took over as principal at the Colored[…]
