So read a headline in Cincinnati’s African American weekly “The Herald” on November 28, 1970. The story covered the dedication of the (then) new William Hartwell Parham Elementary School on Fairfax Avenue in the Evanston neighborhood just east of Walnut Hills. The school solved an embarrassing problem for the Cincinnati Public School board. There were too many students in the neighborhood to fit in the three de facto Black Schools at the time – Evanston, Hoffman and Burdett.
The new school’s namesake William Hartwell Parham (1841 – 1904), a nineteenth century leader in Black Walnut Hills, served as an educator, a lawyer and a Representative in the Ohio legislature. Beginning in 1860 William Parham worked as a teacher in Cincinnati’s segregated Black schools. He rose to become Superintendent of the independent “Colored Schools” between 1866-1876 and Principal of the Black Gaines High School in the last couple of years before the white board closed that famous school in 1889. Even a generation earlier, William’s father Hartwell Parham (1818-1896), a successful Black tobacco processer and wholesaler in downtown Cincinnati, served on our city’s Black School Board in the late 1850s. (The consistent use of Hartwell as a first or middle name over the generations in the family can cause a bit of confusion.)
To return to 1970, William’s grandson Hartwell Parham (1917-1981) took the stage as the keynote speaker at the dedication of the new school. This descendent had also taken up the vocation of education; at the time he labored as the principal of the de facto segregated Rockdale School in Avondale. But the century between William Hartwell Parham’s time as the superintendent of the segregated Black schools during nineteenth-century Reconstruction, and Hartwell Parham’s as a principal during the twentieth-century Civil Rights movement, provided little resolution to the racial discrimination in our city’s schools.
The Herald’s headline captured the main point of the dedicatory address. Hartwell Parham acknowledged the honor bestowed on his family, but he also pointed out a back-handed insult: “Today we are dedicating a school that bears [William Parham’s] name. It is, however, a bit ironic, if we pause to realize that we are dedicating a school that is almost precisely a carbon copy of the schools in which he taught, the schools of which he was principal and the schools over which he was superintendent – all black.” Rockdale School, Hartwell’s charge in Avondale; Burdette School and the grand old Frederick Douglass School in Walnut Hills; the existing Evanston and Hoffman Schools in Evanston and the brand-new William Parham School — all remained Black in apparent defiance of Brown vs. Board of Education in which the Supreme Court had outlawed school segregation in 1954.
Hartwell Parham emerged during the Civil Rights movement from an old, temperate power structure in Black Cincinnati, largely based in his grandfather’s community in Walnut Hills. That community had by the 1960s grown to include Evanston and Avondale. Hartwell Parham saw his grandfather as someone who in his life during Reconstruction “choose to pursue a more scholarly course;” at the height of the Civil Rights movement a century later, Hartwell Parham declared “I, too, chose to follow this route.” Yet this scholarly man’s measured reflections went on pointedly to indict our city as a leader in northern white resistance to Civil Rights. He understood that any serious progress for Black students in Cincinnati required integrated schools. He referred to Black Power, approvingly.
“The move to quality education is progressing, if at all, at a horse and buggy pace in a jet age. We find our leaders unwilling to take a strong affirmative stand in this direction, citing as reasons such bugaboos as the Tina Deal case now before the Supreme Court. We have had studies and surveys. We have surveyed the studies and studied the surveys but done little to implement the recommendations.”
Cincinnati’s legal bugaboo at the time was the argument that our city’s schools are neighborhood schools, and their racial disparities reflect the populations of their neighborhoods. Half a century later, we find in the same neighborhoods that South Avondale, Evanston Academy and Frederick Douglass “Schools Remain Black.”
