A Women’s History Month Lesson: Read an Excerpt from “Keep On Fighting: The Life and Civil Rights Legacy of Marian A. Spencer”

Today, right now, as you are reading this, at the University of Cincinnati, students walk in and out of the glass doors of the dormitory named Marian Spencer Hall on the sometimes luscious green, sometimes snow-covered, college campus. They’re going to their early morning classes, meeting up with friends, or sprinting to the library for a last-minute study session, but outside, they all pass the name of Marian Spencer. 

Marian Spencer’s legacy is found in the friendships forged within classrooms of the schools around our community. Yes, Marian Spencer’s legacy is towering, but she was still just one Black woman who, with help from her husband, Donald, and other Civil Rights leaders, changed how generations of children were raised. 

From helping to integrate Coney Island in 1952 to becoming Vice Mayor of the Cincinnati City Council, Spencer’s achievements are many. She passed away in 2019, at the age of 99, but her story lives on. 

With the help of Ohio University Press, we are publishing an excerpt from the book “Keep On Fighting: The Life and Civil Rights Legacy of Marian A. Spencer” by Dorothy H. Christensen. This excerpt details Cincinnati's long and complicated history with school segregation and Marian’s first-hand accounts about her efforts to improve the integration of public schools in our city. Her efforts were a struggle; she describes this work as “one of the most frustrating of all the projects [she’s] ever worked on.” This excerpt only solidifies the philosophy at the core of Marian Spencer’s activism: You must keep moving forward.

The Ohio legislature authorized separate public schools for African Americans in 1849. Black schools were firmly established in Cincinnati under the direction of Black trustees, elected by Black taxpayers, and financed by a special tax on Black-owned property by 1857. Black property owners in Cincinnati also paid the local property tax that supported the white schools. In 1866 in Cincinnati, under the leadership of Peter H. Clark, the Black trustees established Gaines High School with grades seven to twelve, the first public high school of its kind in Ohio. The school was located at Clark and John Streets, just two blocks west of City Hall. 

A Normal (teaching) department was established in 1868. Virtually all the Black teachers in southwestern Ohio were trained at Gaines High over the next twenty years. The Gaines graduates took the same accreditation exams as white teachers and their marks were comparable. Gaines High School was nationally recognized for its excellence.

The Ohio law mandating separate Black schools was challenged in 1873 when the country was in a severe recession. Local Republicans wanted to make Black schools optional and have a single school system run by a single elected board. This was accomplished by 1874. Cincinnati’s single school board was elected; it was all-white. Mixed schools became a hot political issue in Cincinnati primarily because Black and white students were taught together, but only white teachers could teach in the mixed schools. There was an unwritten rule that Black teachers would not teach white students. 

Peter Clark, founder and principal of Gaines High School, was in favor of mixed schools, provided that the Black and white teaching staffs were mixed as well as the students. Clark helped defeat the mixed school law in 1884. The all-white Cincinnati School Board fired Peter Clark in 1886 because of Clark’s opposition to the mixed schools law and his support of Democratic gubernatorial candidate George Hoadley. Clark was “too political.” The mixed-school law to integrate students, but not teachers, passed again the following year. In 1887, the Arnett Act abolished segregated public schools in Ohio. Gaines High School was closed in 1889. An estimated eight hundred Black children were placed in previously all-white schools by 1890. One hundred and fifty-eight Black students had graduated from Gaines, constituting much of Cincinnati’s Black middle class. Cincinnati’s two remaining high schools, Hughes and Woodward, graduated only eighty-nine Black students during the next twenty years despite the school-age Black population having doubled during the period. 

The declining Black student enrollment was attributed to a general lack of acceptance by white faculty and students, and low teacher expectations of Black students. Cincinnati’s elementary and junior high schools were well on their way to complete resegregation by the turn of the twentieth century.  

The total economic, social, and political marginalization of Blacks from mainstream society in Cincinnati was established by 1920. Students attended schools in their immediate (segregated) neighborhoods, thus accomplishing segregation despite the law. The school board built the excellent all-Black K-9 Harriet Beecher Stowe School for Dr. Jennie Porter, the first Black female Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati. Not until 1943, however, was one Black teacher assigned to a white Cincinnati public school. A second brave soul became a Black teacher in a white elementary school in 1949. 

In the decade from 1940 to 1950, including the war years, the Cincinnati Black population went from 55,500 to 75,000, an increase of 40 percent. By 1960, the Black population was 108,757, or 39 percent of the total number of city residents. By 1970, the city lost 50,000 people, 95 percent of them white. Cincinnati had experienced a major shift in population: it was Blacker and poorer. The city’s public schools went through a similar change. In addition to white flight to the suburbs, white families who could not, or who chose not to, move out of the city transferred thousands of children out of Cincinnati’s public schools as the Black population increased. Catholic and private schools, both religious and secular, flourished.

Following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court decision that abolished separate but equal schools, the Cincinnati Public School (CPS) Board of Education and the Cincinnati branch of the NAACP began a long struggle to resolve issues that had not been addressed successfully since Reconstruction. CPS did not, however, establish policies to integrate the schools until 1972. That year a more liberal CPS Board passed a hotly contested comprehensive desegregation plan at the end of the year. The intent was to insure a quality integrated education for all students in all Cincinnati public schools and to implement racial balance among teachers and students. 

Marian Spencer was chair of the NAACP Education Committee in 1972. She had been attending the monthly CPS Board meetings to see what steps they intended to take to integrate Cincinnati’s mostly segregated schools. At that time, school buses took black children to predominantly Black schools even when there was a closer public school in a mostly white neighborhood. Black teenagers from “hilltop” Clifton and Avondale were bussed downtown to the West End’s Taft High School, right past the doors of the elegant Hughes High School across the street from the University of Cincinnati. 

Marian tells of her involvement: 

Our local legal fight to improve school integration began back in the 1970s, or earlier. I attended the Cincinnati Public School Board meetings regularly. You could say I was a pain in the neck to the board president, Virginia Griffin. My primary complaint was the lack of any plan or progress to integrate Cincinnati schools following the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Mrs. Griffin’s attitude was that the board was not doing anything to impede integration. Mrs. Griffin went so far as to advise my friend Marianna Brown Bettman, a future judge and law professor, not to sit with me at school board meetings as it could damage Ms. Bettman’s reputation! Marianna and I had become friends through Fellowship House. Our work to integrate Cincinnati’s public schools became a very long, discouraging process. 

I ran for election to the CPS Board in 1973 because I wanted to implement the new integration plan adopted the year before. I was the first Black female candidate to run for election to the Cincinnati school board. The liberal members of the board were up for reelection and we ran a hard, vigorous campaign. But we were defeated. A majority of voters didn’t like the busing that was part of the desegregation plan adopted in December 1972. The newly elected conservative board voted to drop the previously approved plan. Four months later we (NAACP) filed the class action Mona Bronson et al. v. Cincinnati Board of Education lawsuit. 

Donald and I were among several plaintiffs in the Bronson case. The purpose was to force implementation of the 1972 comprehensive integration plan that the newly elected board had overturned. The lawsuit sought to assign staff to each school according to the racial balance of the district and included a busing plan. Initially, all the suburban school districts were included as codefendants along with the Ohio Department of Education. We included the white suburban districts, hoping for regional balance. The suburban school districts fought this in court, and they were allowed to pull out. 

The NAACP and CPS also contested in court whether examples of Cincinnati school discriminatory practices that had been included in an earlier [discrimination] suit could be used by the NAACP in the Bronson case. There were so many delays in the lawsuit and white flight kept getting worse. Even the argument that a consolidated school district would be more cost-effective and efficient didn’t work. There are still more than twenty separate districts in the county. 

 The newspapers reported all the continuing trial delays of the case. School board candidates were allowed to discuss the case during the election campaign in 1977. I was quoted in one Cincinnati Enquirer article regarding the indefinite postponement. This article says: 

Marian Spencer, chairman of the local NAACP Education Committee, said “our lawyers told us this [the postponement] probably would occur. We hope it’s short-lived.” Spencer said she “hopes the judge who will get the case is a person who has a bit of experience in this area. I hope the judge who gets it is worthy of the case because it affects a lot of children, Black and white.” 

You know the Bronson case never came to trial. The Court mandated establishment of the Bronson committee in 1984 to monitor progress of the court-ordered integration plan for the schools. I was asked to chair the committee but I wanted to be able to speak out about my opinions and not be restrained as the chair. This settlement even made the New York Times. The settlement may have been a model but it was weak compared to the original lawsuit. We met, the Bronson committee, over the next twenty years, until 2004, to oversee the required changes in Cincinnati schools. 

This case was the most frustrating of all the projects I’ve ever worked on. The delays took years. When the suburban districts were dismissed it gutted the whole thing. The magnet schools and integration of teachers were successes, and school busing was implemented, but the demographics of the whole city changed after 1960. White families just moved out or sent their kids to private schools. School segregation still continues as now children of African American and poor families are the majority attending public schools. The old housing patterns still mean that a majority of public schools are mostly segregated. That Post article about population shifts is still relevant today.

We tried hard, but my philosophy has always been not to waste too much time looking back. There is too much left to do to lament what didn’t work. We didn’t lose the case for lack of trying. Looking back should be just long enough to see what lessons you can learn from a disappointment. I learned not to take defeat personally, from the school board election, the lengthy Bronson case, or reelection to city council. Sometimes, though, it is worth noting that even losing educates some people about the problem, and it is fun to think back about some of the victories.

You can read more about the life and activism of Marian Spencer here.