Ohio History Journal

LEE WILLIAMS

Newcomers to the City: A Study

of Black Population Growth in

Toledo, Ohio, 1910-1930

 

Negroes no longer live in a few houses in a widely separated

section. They have come to constitute in themselves a good

size city.1

 

Beginning around 1915, increasing numbers of Afro-Americans

pushed out of the south into northern and midwestern urban commu-

nities, large and small. The massive migration of blacks to the north

is well known, but has been documented chiefly for the largest northern

cities-New York, Chicago, and Cleveland rather than for lesser cities.

This study seeks to view the process in a smaller, less publicized city,

Toledo, Ohio, and to explore the general conditions in housing and

employment confronting the black community in the two decades after

1910.2

 

Between 1910 and 1930, the number of black residents in Toledo rose

from 1,877 to 13,260, an increase of more than 336 percent. During this

same period, the total population of the city grew by only 64 percent,

from 168,497 to 290,718. These percentages represent the net decennial

growth of the black and white communities; they do not show the

number of residents who moved in or out of the city on a monthly or

yearly basis. Despite the lack of such data, it can be stated that within

the space of a single decade, 1910-1920, the Afro-American population

soared from 1,877 to 5,691 and represented 2.3 percent of the city's

 

 

Lee Williams is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Arkansas at Little

Rock.

 

 

1. Toledo Blade, June 6, 1923; Toledo Observer, November 10, 1923.

2. For a discussion of black migration and its impact, see, George W. Groh, The Black

Migration: The Journey to Urban America (New York, 1972). There are several excellent

studies dealing with the formation of black community life in the larger northern cities

and the impact of incoming southern black migrants. See, for example, Gilbert Osofsky,

Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto, Negro New York, 1890-1930 (New York, 1968); Allan

Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920 (Chicago, 1967);

and Kenneth Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870-1930 (Urbana,

Illinois, 1976).

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6                                                             OHIO HISTORY

 

243,164 residents. During the next decade, this figure increased to 13,260

or 4.6 percent of Toledo's total population of 290,718. As shown in the

following table, the net black population increases between 1910 and

1930 departed sharply from those of earlier years.3

 

 

 

Black Population of Toledo, 1880-1930

 

Percent             Increase

Total                   Black                   Percent            Total                 Black

Year         population            population          Black           population        population

1880        50,137                     928                    1.9                   58.7                  51.6

1890        81,434                     1,077                 1.3                   62.4                  16.05

1900        131,822                   1,710                 1.3                   61.9                  58.7

1910        168,497                   1,877                 1.1                   27.8                  9.8

1920        243,164                   5,691                 2.3                   44.3               203.2

1930        290,718                 13,260                 4.6                   19.6               133.0

Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census Reports, 1880-1930.

 

The growth of black Toledo brought significant changes in the compo-

sition of its population. In 1900, almost 45 percent of the city's 1,710

black residents were native Ohioans. Twenty years later, only one-fourth

of the Afro-American population of 5,691 were born in Ohio and by

1930 this percentage had decreased to roughly 22 percent. Moreover, the

intervening years between 1900 and 1930 witnessed important shifts in

 

 

 

3. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Compendium of the Tenth Census, 1880: Population,

Part I (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1883), Table XXIV: 398; U.S.

Bureau of the Census, Eleventh Census of the United States, 1890: Population, Part I

(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1895), Table 19: 475; U.S. Bureau of the

Census, Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900: Population (Washington, D.C.:

Government Printing Office, 1902), Table 81: 105; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth

Census of the United States, 1910: Abstract with Supplement for Ohio, Statistics on

Population (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1913), Table V: 635; U.S.

Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920: Population,

Montana- Wyoming (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1922), III, Table 23:

536; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Negroes in the United States, 1920-1932 (Washington,

D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1935), Table 13: 12. While the Toledo City Directories

occasionally cited those residents who left the city, the doubtful reliability of these sources

rendered a systematic compilation of out-going persons untenable. There are similar and

related problems inherent in the use of federal census data. For a critical discussion of the

"decennial census," see Sidney Goldstein, The Norristown Study: An Experiment in

Interdisciplinary Research Training (Philadelphia, 1961), 95.

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Newcomers to the City                                                    7

 

the origins of migrants to the city. For example, in 1900 13.3 percent of

Toledo's black residents born outside Ohio were natives of the midwest-

ern states of Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. By 1930, less

than one-tenth of the Afro-American population were natives of these

same midwestern states. Similarly, the 1900 black population received

only 12.3 percent of its 1,710 members from the states of Kentucky,

Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi, and about this same percentage

from the Virginias, Carolinas, and Georgia. By 1930, this was no longer

true. While one-fourth of all the blacks in Toledo were natives of the

Virginias, Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida, more than 45 percent

(almost one-half of the total population of 13,260) were born in the

four states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi. The

greatest number of these Afro-Americans, 35 percent, were native

Tennesseans. In all, the generation from 1900 to 1930 witnessed a

decided shift in the origins of black newcomers to Toledo from the

midwest to greater numbers from the southwest and the "deep south."⁴

Despite their southern nativity, an indeterminate number of Afro-

Americans entered Toledo via other northern industrial communities.

Indications are that these southern-born migrants underwent a "falling

back" process as they left such cities as Detroit and Chicago to settle

in Toledo. In part, these newcomers considered Toledo's relatively small

Negro population as one which offered a greater degree of "elbow

room" from the overcrowding that plagued larger communities. In

short, it was a place that "promised expanded opportunities" and yet

was small enough for one to "put down roots and raise a family."

Beyond the selection of Toledo as a second or perhaps even third desti-

nation for migrants, the community shared in the World War I north-

ward drive of southern black Americans.⁵

There is no attempt here to recapitulate the numerous and well-

 

4. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900: Population,

I (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1901), Tables 30-32: 718-21; U.S.

Bureau of the Census, Negroes in the United States, 1920-1932, Table 16: 34-36. For a

discussion of the directional changes in black migratorial movements, see Warren C.

Thornthwaite, "Internal Migration in the United States, A Study of Population Redis-

tribution," Bulletin Number One (Philadelphia, 1934), 14; U.S. Bureau of the Census,

Changing Characteristics of the Negro Population, by Daniel O. Price (A 1960 census

monograph) (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1969), 215; and Philip M.

Hanser, "Demographic Factors in the Integration of the Negro," Daedalus, 94 (Fall,

1965).

5. Toledo Blade, August 9, 1929; Emmett L. Wheaton, "The Social Status of the

Negro in Toledo, Ohio" (Unpublished Master's Thesis, University of Toledo, Toledo,

Ohio, 1927), hereinafter cited as Wheaton, "The Social Status of the Negro in Toledo";

also see Emmett J. Scott, "Leaders of Negro Migrants of 1916-1918," Journal of Negro

History, IV (July, October, 1919), 290-340; and Scott, Negro Migration During the War

(New York, 1920, reprinted Arno Press and New York Times, 1969), 126-27.

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8                                                        OHIO HISTORY

 

discussed reasons prompting the migration of southern Negroes to the

urban north. There is, however, one area of the migrant's experiences

that is often neglected in the literature on migratorial movements. This

concerns the "special attachment" of some migrants to the homes left

behind. In general, researchers have been primarily interested in causa-

tion as a factor in migration. There was little reason, it appears, to

question the migrant equally about the positive and negative aspects of

his or her life in the south. At least one black Toledoan, Edward

Williams, when asked about the memorable times of his life in Georgia

before his migration to the city in 1924, stated that some things could

not be replaced with the journey north. While opportunities appeared

to be greater outside the south, the new community, at least initially,

could not erase certain memories of life on the farm. There was no

regret, said Williams, in leaving the oppression of his native Georgia.

Neither was there remorse in escaping the periodic drudgery that

accompanied the hard and uncertain nature of farming. For Williams,

there was, in the new environment, a "sense of community lost and

belonging" that once played an important role in the everyday lives of

neighbors.⁶

Other blacks attempted and eventually succeeded in recreating a farm

routine and familiar way of life in the Toledo area. Joe Jordan left

Georgia in 1923 for the lure of "steady wages" in the city's industries.

Once in Toledo, Jordan "found only low pay and poor living condi-

tions." "I didn't have but these two hands to support a family," said

Jordan, "and I couldn't do it." In 1940, Jordan left the city for the

outlying area of Spencer Township where he purchased ten acres of

land and began to farm once again. Mississippian Henry Smith also

came to Toledo in 1923. Smith, like Jordan, eventually left the city for

the rural life of Spencer Township. It was "the only place we could get,"

stated Smith, "where we could settle down and have a farm" once

again. Martin Washington entered Toledo from Mounds, Illinois in

1929. As the son of a farmer, Washington soon grew restless with

life in the city and became a part of the growing number of Afro-

Americans who acquired farms in the rural areas surrounding Toledo.⁷

Although the sentimental attachment to the farm or home life of the

south was not shared by every migrant, it did form a significant force

 

6. Interviews with Edward Williams, Toledo, Ohio, June-August, 1976. For a dis-

cussion of the diverse attitudes and sentiments of southern migrants, see Arna Bontemps

and Jack Conroy, They Seek a City (New York, 1945), xvi-xviii; Eugene B. Brody, ed.,

Behavior in New Environments: Adaptation of Migrant Populations (Beverly Hills,

California, 1969).

7. Abner Katzman, "The Farmers," Toledo Blade, Sunday Magazine (August 3,

1975), 8-10, hereinafter cited as Katzman, "The Farmers."

• 4
 

Newcomers to the City                                                9

 

in the lives of some of those who arrived in the urban north between

1915 and 1930. The lingering memories of rural life have been captured

and expanded as a group phenomenon in the prose of journalist Dwayne

Walls. He writes:

 

Leaving the farm is not an easy thing to do. The farm is home, even when

home is a shack owned by the man up the road. It is a nail beside the kitchen

door where the hat has been hung for thirty years.It is the old cane-bottomed

chair under the shade tree, where ice water tastes so good at the end of a

summer's day. It is the smell of manure and old harness leather, and the

memory of young love carved on the barn door: [LTW loves MMY]. It is the

church and the graveyard, where parents and brothers and sisters and babies

are buried. It is the debt still owed to the landlord - a debt that never seems to

go away no matter how good the crop.8

 

There were, then, at least three distinctive forces that found a place in

the growth of such a community as black Toledo during the two decades

after 1910. One set "pulled" blacks ever northward. A second set, the

brutalities in the south (both mental and physical), "pushed" many

Afro-Americans out of their native states. Still a third set, the loss of

both a "sense of community" and the prospects of the unknown,

was at work creating doubts and identity problems for many migrants.

It is unlikely that this third set of factors can ever be fully measured.⁹

 

II

Of all the possible reasons prompting the migration of blacks to the

north, the wartime economy accompanied by growing restrictions upon

the flow of an immigrant labor supply must be considered as major

factors in creating greater industrial prospects for the Afro-American.

As early as 1914, Toledo's major industrial concerns looked to the war

in Europe as an important boost to the growth and prosperity of local

business and labor. "With business in Europe at a standstill," said John

North Willys, President of Willys-Overland Motor Company, "America

will become the factory, the forge, the farm, and the one big source

from which the other nations of the world must of necessity draw their

supplies." Toledo's Commerce Club concurred with Willys and pre-

dicted that the city would experience excellent business conditions

"during the next five years."10

 

8. Dwayne E. Walls, The Chickenbone Special (New York, 1970), 59.

9. Toledo Blade, June 6, 1923. For a discussion of the psychological implications

of migratorial movements, see Demitri B. Shimkin, "Black Migration and the Struggle

for Equality: A Hundred-Year Survey," in Joseph W. Eaton, ed., Migration and Social

Welfare (New York, 1971), 80-103.

10. John North Willys to the Toledo Blade, August 21, 22, 1914.

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10                                                          OHIO HISTORY

 

Even as certain Toledo business and civic leaders looked forward to

a boom for the local and national economy, the country's supply of

foreign laborers began to decline. By 1914, in fact, the number of

immigrants who entered Toledo and the nation had been drastically

reduced. A survey of this reduction in foreign-born whites to the city

is suggestive of the coming availability of increased economic prospects,

even as common laborers, for black newcomers. Around the turn of

the twentieth century, more than 12,300 foreign-born whites entered

Toledo. From 1901 to 1910, this number declined to 8,444. Between

1911 and 1914, only 5,049 foreign-born whites arrived in the city and

during the next four years, this number fell to 1,200. This figure

increased to slightly more than 3,000 between 1920 and 1924, but

dropped to around 2,200 from 1925 to 1930.11

Similarly, the number of incoming foreign-born whites declined across

the nation as the "long debate" concerning the "fitness" of newer

immigrant strains intensified during the first three decades of the

twentieth century. And while Afro-Americans were not spared the

onslaught of a body of racist literature during the period, the steady

reduction in the number of white immigrant laborers paved the way for

the largely unskilled southern Negro to enter the industrial north.12

 

III

In the summer of 1917, Toledo's leading newspaper, the Blade,

admonished its readers to accept "Negro immigration as a permanent

dilution of the white population." On an historical note, the Blade's

use of the words "permanent dilution" smacked of the "Negrophobia"

that swept Toledo in July, 1862. At that time, violence had erupted

in the city not only from actual increases in black numbers but from

the "prospect" of an expanded Negro population. Such fear had cer-

tainly found a prominent place across much of the north in the days of

slavery, secession, and civil war-but this was another time. During the

 

 

 

11. Toledo Blade, August 27, 1914; June 21, 1915; and May 6, 1916.

12. Toledo Blade, October 6, 1919; June 24, 1920; May 9, 1923. For a discussion of

European immigration and its curtailment, see Oscar Handlin, ed., Immigration As a

Factor in American History (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1959), 167; John Higham,

"Origins of Immigration Restriction, 1882-1897: A Social Analysis," in Stanley N. Katz

and Stanley E. Kutler, New Perspective on the American Past, II (Boston, 1969), 90;

Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New

Brunswick, New Jersey, 1955); and Stanley Coben, "A Study in Nativism: The American

Red Scare of 1919-1920," Katz and Kutler, New Perspectives on the American Past, II,

205. For a black American view of Immigration, see the Crisis, "Immigration Quota,"

Editorial, 36, no. 8 (August, 1929), 278, and William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs, Black

Rage (New York, 1968), 172.

• 6
 

Newcomers to the City                                                11

 

summer months of 1917, old fears and suspicions were rekindled. The

Blade called attention to the citizenship of blacks and their right to

"move about in America as it pleases them." The fact that the newspaper

found it necessary, almost a half-century after the Fourteenth Amend-

ment, to remind its readers that Afro-Americans were citizens, is

indicative of many of the fears engendered by the massive interstate

movement of Negroes.13

In preparation for black newcomers to the city, the Blade warned

against "allowing the growth of squalid quarters of disease and crime."

Moreover, the city should "make things uncomfortable for vagrants

and use a stern hand to deal with imported thieves and thugs." The

application of vagrancy laws to a migrant population, however, could

be grossly more complicated than whether or not a person held a job.

In short, such provisions, especially during the frenzied years of the

First World War, needed a certain compassion for the disorientated

newcomer as well as the welfare of the host community. As migrants

increased during the summer of 1917, Toledo offered "loafers" (va-

grants) a simple choice: "work or prison." And while such an ultimatum

proved largely ineffective in stemming the tide of Afro-Americans,

Toledo, cautioned the Blade, had a duty to guard against any threats,

both economic and social, to the larger community.14

The migration of Afro-Americans to Toledo included a number of

employees of the New York Central and Penn Central Railroads.

Among these blacks, Mary Welch, an ex-slave and native of Martin,

Tennessee, came to Toledo via Carbondale, Illinois in 1917. It is

possible that she was among the "⁸⁹⁶ Negroes," aboard "sixteen

railroad cars," who entered the city in late May of that year. As the

wife of a Penn Central employee, Welch and her family occupied a

"company house" along Bryne Road in the southwest of the city. Other

migrants, and perhaps most, were not so fortunate: they took their

shelter in hastily erected camps of railroad cars. In some of these settle-

ments, the railroads and their agents observed marginal rules of good

health and sanitation. In others, however, the living conditions were

deplorable.15

 

 

 

13. Ibid.; also see Richard Weiss and Gary B. Nash, eds., The Great Fear: Race in the

Mind of America (New York, 1970); Toledo Blade, June 1, 1917. In July, 1862, Toledo

was the scene of violence as a white mob of striking dock workers and citizens attempted

to drive blacks from the city and discourage further Afro-American in-migration. See

the Toledo Blade, July 7-11, 1862; and Frank R. Levstik, "The Toledo Riot of 1862:

A Study of Midwest Negrophobia," Northwest Ohio Quarterly, XLIV (Fall, 1972), 104.

14. Toledo Blade, May 22, 1917; June 1, 1917.

15. Toledo Blade, May 23, 1917; June 17, 1917; October 15, 1972.

• 7
 

12                                                         OHIO HISTORY

 

On May 22, 1917, Toledo health authorities responded to several

anonymous complaints concerning conditions in some of the city's

railroad camps. On the East Side, law officers arrested agent Edward M.

Cosner of the New York Central Railroad. According to health officials,

Cosner's practice of housing "fifteen to twenty Negroes in one box car"

was a health hazard not only to the inhabitants but to the entire

community. Shortly after the Cosner incident, the Commerce Club

convened a meeting of city officials and New York Central authorities.

Civic authorities also invited Charles Cottrill, a prominent black

community leader, "to the conference to speak for black laborers."

There are no indications that city officials proposed measures to halt

the human habitation of box cars or required improvements in the

standard of living. Cottrill offered the most incisive comments when he

stated that due to economic conditions, incoming blacks had little choice

where or in what they lived. Most of these "Negroes," stated Cottrill,

"are unable to buy or rent houses and must be housed in box cars." 16

For other blacks, both newcomers and old settlers, the limits to where

they could live in the city consisted of areas and homes uncontested by

native white and foreign populations. The largest concentration of

Negroes were located in the Pinewood, Canton, Stickney, and Summit

Street districts. Since the turn of the twentieth century, the Pinewood

area to the southwest had witnessed the fastest growth in black residences.

In 1890, for example, only 5.5 percent of a representative sample of

two hundred Toledo Afro-Americans resided in this area. Between 1895

and 1900 this percentage increased to 10.5 percent, and by 1910 over

32 percent of the sample group listed their residences there. The growing

concentration of Negroes in this and other areas resulted from tradi-

tional residential restrictions as well as the expansion of whites into more

attractive neighborhoods in West Toledo. As whites relinquished their

hold over certain housing in the southwest, blacks were able to widen

their areas of residence. The migration of southern Negroes served to

broaden the earlier, and less visible, street or block segregation in the

city. When Afro-Americans breached the walls of black habitation,

whites reacted adversely. This was especially true in East Toledo where

white ethnic groups maintained distinct enclaves.17

 

16. Toledo Blade, May 23, 1917; July 17, 1917.

17. Between 1890 and 1915, The Polk's Toledo City Directories designated blacks

listed in the directory by race. Two hundred blacks were selected on a random basis from

the 1890 listing for the purpose of noting residential clustering as well as tracing move-

ments in dwellings and employment. The two hundred members of the sample group

were also studied to determine their representative character to that of the general

population according to the percentage and kinds of jobs held and those enumerated

in the federal census. Also see Toledo Blade, July 13, 1917; Early Adams, "Correlation

of Housing Conditions with the Health and Growth of Children in Toledo" (unpublished

• 8
 

Newcomers to the City                                               13

 

In July, 1917, an unidentified black rented a house in East Toledo

"adjacent to an area of Bulgarian immigrants." Shortly after his arrival,

he received a scrawled note which read: "No let to Nigger. Place bum

[sic]. I your friend." It is uncertain whether this black stayed

in the area for very long. According to the Blade, there had been "several

intimations of hostility between negroes [sic] and aliens." This was,

however, the first reported threat of violence. 18

During the summer of 1919, East Toledo was again the scene of

racial tension as 146 white residents signed a "pact" (restrictive

covenant) attempting to bar Negroes from "Vinal, Albert, and adjacent

Streets." Jason Spaulding, an area resident, filed the "agreement bearing

the 146 signatures" with the County Recorder's Office. Interestingly,

this neighborhood pact came two years after the United States Supreme

Court's decision in Buchanan vs Warley declared the use of such devices

to segregate residences as unconstitutional. East Toledoans, perhaps

reflecting the larger society's rather tenuous commitment to enforce

this decision, were either unaware of or cared little for the court's

opinion. What they did care about, according to the agreement, was

a "pledge of moral support towards ridding the community of un-

desireable characters, especially Colored people." "We refuse," said

the residents, "to rent or sell property to them." "We believe," con-

cluded the signers of the covenant, "that every self-respecting Colored

person will take advantage of this opportunity to find a home elsewhere

among those who do not object to their presence." This residential

covenant did not go unnoticed by the local chapter of the National

Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The organization

promised that "some action would be taken," but what that action was

remains unknown.19

Black residents were not new to East Toledo. Even in the nineteenth

century, there had been a small settlement in the general area. With the

arrival of newcomers during the First World War, the traditional areas

of Negro residences (sections of certain streets or blocks) threatened to

overflow their borders. The catalyst in East Toledo's racial troubles

appears to have been the existence of highly concentrated and lasting

enclaves of white ethnic groups, among them such foreign-born residents

as the Hungarians and Bulgarians. These immigrant enclaves in East

 

Master's Thesis, University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio, 1930); and Everett Johnson,

"A Study of the Negro Families in the Pinewood Avenue District of Toledo, Ohio,"

Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life, VII (New York, National Urban League, August,

1929), 243-45.

18. Toledo Blade, July 13, 1917.

19. Toledo Blade, June 5, 1919; also see Joseph Tussman, ed., The Supreme Court

on Racial Discrimination (New York, 1963), 279-81.

• 9
 

14                                                         OHIO HISTORY

 

Toledo did not undergo the rapid and even moderate change that took

place, for example, within the ranks of expanding Polish and Irish

settlers to the southwest in the city. The slower rate of neighborhood

change among certain immigrant groups was due to a variety of reasons,

ranging from nativist sentiment against newer immigrants to a desire

on the part of some foreign-born residents to share mutually-held

cultural amenities. Moreover, certain geographical features, a smaller

land area, and the Maumee River also precluded large-scale residential

expansion in East Toledo. These and other features strained race

relations in the area²⁰

In the period to 1930, it is uncertain to what extent white residents

throughout Toledo entered into restrictive covenants or "Neighborhood

Improvement Associations" to bar Afro-Americans from certain streets

or neighborhoods. However, the latter "pact or agreement" operated

under a variety of generic names that produced the same general

results-racial segregation. Unlike the more explicit restrictive cove-

nants, these associations did not bear the outward appearance of

exclusion. When East Toledoans launched their "Citizens' Realty Plan"

in late December, 1919, they simply reported that it was a "a holding

and developing company aimed at the development of the right kind of

property." There were no references to race, only to the development

of the "right kind of property." Exclusion was implied, however, and

sufficient to foster and maintain residential segregation.21

Whether associated "for improvement" or explicitly to exclude

"undesireable elements," property owners had to have the cooperation

of others. Undoubtedly, the most important outside parties to a

restrictive covenant were local realtors and boards. While there is little

to directly link the city's real estate commission with the covenant and

Citizens Realty Plan of East Toledo, it is unlikely that realtors were

unaware of the aims of community residents. This is given greater

meaning when one considers that from its inception in 1908 until 1950,

the "Code of Ethics" of the National Association of Real Estate Boards

included the following provision:

 

 

20. Toledo Blade, June 5, 1919. In a survey of two hundred blacks from various

sections of the city between 1890 and 1915, there was a distinct clustering of Negro

residents wherever they lived. Of those who lived in East Toledo, the majority were

located on Yondotta and Vinal Streets. See Polk's Toledo City Directories, 1890-1915.

21. Toledo Blade, December 18, 1919. For a discussion of restrictive covenants and

neighborhood improvement associations, see Herman H. Long and Charles S. Johnson,

People vs Property: Race Restrictive Covenants in Housing (Nashville, Tennessee, 1947),

3-4, hereinafter cited as Long and Johnson, People vs Property; and The Report of the

Commission on Race and Housing, "Where Shall We Live?" (Berkeley and Los Angeles,

California, 1958), 1-20.

• 10
 

Newcomers to the City                                               15

 

A realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into neighborhoods ...

members of any race or nationality . . .whose presence will be clearly detri-

mental to property values in that neighborhood.

 

And while East Toledoans cited in their restrictive covenant of 1919 the

depreciation of property values and the general presence of "colored

families" as their major complaints, the reduction of land and property

values hinged more on the reactions of whites than blacks. If, for

example, whites fled the presence of incoming Negroes, the cry of

property value loss by realtors served to enhance their profits while

simultaneously increasing racial hostility. In all, Toledo's realtors could

ill-afford to engender the wrath of irate white property owners.²²

 

IV

There were areas in the city, customarily referred to as the "tender-

loin," in which residents said little, at least publicly, about those who

came in search of housing. As early as 1906, sections of Erie, Jackson,

Beech, Ontario, and Canton Streets were singled out as social problems

for Toledo. There, blacks and whites inhabited the city's older and

more dilapidated housing and lived, according to juvenile authorities,

like "rabbits in a warren, Colored and whites all mixed up together."

In a sense, poor housing and poor migrants were made for one another.

"Based on what they get for their pitifuly scanty dollars," reported

Toledo's City Journal in 1918, these residents "are paying the highest

rents for squalid vermin-ridden quarters that in many cases are not fit for

the housing of animals." Neither was the general area free from wartime

rent profiteering, as the City Journal cited repeated instances of land-

lords charging $4 per week and more for "two small, dark, and damp

basement rooms." Others rented "fancy cellars" to newcomers for as

much as $22 per month. Still other holders of rental properties on

Huron, Tenth, Locust, and Illinois Streets (in the near downtown area)

exacted, at times, more than the human market could bear. Many of

these dwellings did "not have running water except that which seeped

through leaky roofs and cellar doors." They were, said the City Journal,

the homes of the poor, the desperately poor migrants, natives, and

foreigners who were forced to take "such quarters because they had . . .

no choice."23

 

 

22. The Toledo Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored

People, "Containment of Minority Groups Through Housing" (Unpublished pamphlet,

nd), 9 (Local History Room, Toledo-Lucas County Public Library); also see Henry E.

Hoagland, Real Estate Principles (New York, 1955), 400-15.

23. Toledo Blade, October 15, 1906; May 19, October 15, 1916; September 3, 1917;

• 11
 

16                                                       OHIO HISTORY

 

It was more than an uphill struggle for these residents as they searched

the city for affordable housing. The unemployed poor faced a double risk,

for Toledo's "watchful eye" for vagrants presented the possibility that

such persons would be "warned out" of the city and sent penniless in

search of new homes. Moreover, unemployment meant that rents could

not be paid. In the event of the latter, some landlords, rather than evict

non-paying tenants, kept "rent accounts" that could be paid once

employment was secured. With each week or month of unemployment,

the landlord became more the master and the tenant the "slave." "Like

fat spiders," stated the City Journal, landlords who kept rent accounts

"settled down on their prey and watched the struggle with cold-blooded

glee." They have, continued the City Journal, "a double pack of slaves

who are bound to turn over to them every dollar they make, over and

above the amount they must retain for food." Here was an urban

parallel to the infamous sharecropping system of the rural south. Only

housing replaced land and crops in the landlord-tenant relationship.

For those who found themselves chained to exorbitant rents or devious

land contracts, self-extraction bordered on the impossible. Moreover,

landlords in Toledo were not compelled to maintain standards for their

dwellings. The city did not have either a housing or comprehensive

building code in 191824

The exorbitant rents charged for some Toledo dwellings did not

escape the attention of public officials. In August, 1919, Mayor Cornell

Schreiber authorized Assistant Prosecutor for Lucas County, Swamp

Doty, to investigate housing and food prices. The inquiry into rents

and food prices had more implications than a breach of moral propriety

by landlords and store owners. Some officials believed that profiteers

were in direct violation of the wartime Lever Act regulating prices on

certain consumer goods and services. It is unknown whether Doty

actively sought to prosecute profiteers. Exorbitant rents, however,

continued well into 1920. "Scores of families," reported the Blade, have

"had their rents boosted from fifteen to sixty-six and two-thirds

percent." In one such case, a black soldier returned to Toledo after

eighteen months of service to find "the rent on his modest quarters"

increased from $15 to $25 per month. Unlike those who maintained

special rent accounts in 1918, some landlords, perhaps due to the failure

 

 

also see Supplement to the Toledo City Journal, "Housing Conditions in Toledo," no. 13

(Toledo: The Commission of Publicity and Efficiency, May 20, 1916), 2-3; and Toledo

City Journal, III, No. 48 (November 30, 1918), 554-55. Perhaps the vermin of rat-infested

housing in Toledo was most graphically illustrated when authorities discovered the half-

devoured face of a black corpse on Canton Street in 1917.

24. Toledo City Journal, III, no. 48 (November 30, 1918), 555.

• 12
 

Newcomers to the City                                           17

 

of such methods, refused (in 1919-1920) to accept credit and gave

tenants an ultimatum to "come across or get out."25

Toledo was not alone in the rash of rent profiteering during and

after the First World War. Between 1919 and 1921, several bills were

introduced in the Ohio Legislature to curb steep rents. Fearing that such

legislation would take too long to enact, Toledo officials looked beyond

the state to such cities as Seattle, Washington, and nearby Detroit for

rent plans. In these cities, outlandish rents were eased, if not controlled,

through a variety of measures including landlord licenses, bonds, and

taxation based on rents received. While Toledo contemplated the use of

similar measures, it did not enact them. It is possible that such devices

failed to become law for the same reason that left the city without an

effective housing code in the period 1918 to 1922. According to an

investigative report of the City Journal, Toledo did not have a housing

code because "the men who would have much to do with the framing

of its provisions were now in government service." As property owners,

many of these officials would, in effect, enact measure that stood to

affect themselves directly. Here, profits seemed to outweigh any moral

conviction leading to better housing with reasonable rents. Undoubtedly,

some viewed their roles as simply providing a service for the countless

thousands who arrived in the city in search of shelter.²⁶

A nationwide housing shortage during World War I also served to

stimulate the growth of profiteering in Toledo and across the nation.

As newcomers crowded into urban communities, the available housing-

good, poor, and otherwise-went to the highest bidder. In May, 1920,

Toledo's City Council considered two measures aimed at curbing

excessive rates: "One proposed ordinance would permit landlords

to charge rents based on the valuation of the property held," while a

second measure "made it a misdemeanor, punishable by fine, for

landlords to fail to keep up repairs on property as agreed at the time of

leasing." Again, these proposed measures either failed to be enacted

or were simply ignored, as the Blade reported a year later that "city

housing" remained "a menace." As late as 1920-1921, housing codes

were still being proposed as "²⁰ to 30 percent of Toledo's entire

population lived under crowded conditions." In the Canton Street

district, black and white families continued to crowd into available

housing where they paid rents "disproportionate to the conditions of the

dwellings." Some of these ill-ventilated homes were without indoor

 

25. Toledo Blade, August 9, 1919; September 4, 1919; December 11, 1919; and

May 18, 1920.

26. Toledo Blade, May 18, 1920; Toledo City Journal, III, no. 48 (November 30,

1918), 555.

• 13
 

18                                                        OHIO HISTORY

 

water supplies. While there are no indications that the quality of such

dwellings improved, rents in Toledo did stabilize in the early months

of 1922. Perhaps the appeals of city officials, the fluctuation in

newcomers, and the enforcement of existing building provisions played

important roles in the stabilization of rents. Still, Toledo continued to

have a shortage of housing well into the decade of the 1920s. For those

residents who faced constant hardships in acquiring dwellings due to

socioeconomic factors, it was not until 1933 and the Great Depression

that Ohio enacted a "low-rent" housing law.²⁷

 

V

There were other Toledoans, black and white, who escaped the high

and unstable rents of 1920-1923. These residents either owned or were

buying their homes. To be sure, the general residential crisis (both in

availability and cost) had an effect upon home buyers and renters alike.

This was especially true for black Toledoans. "While the white popu-

lation," stated Toledo's Observer in 1923, "suffers to some extent

because of inadequate housing conditions, white people get the first

choice whenever new houses are built." "Moreover," continued the

newspaper, "only a very small proportion of the Negro population

can afford to meet the large down payments required on new houses

in the city. Hence, altogether too many Colored people are forced to

live in old, unsanitary houses." In a large measure, Afro-American

residents, with their jobs as laborers, janitors, porters, and servants,

could only fill-up the deserted housing of whites as they expanded across

the city. 28

Unfortunately, home ownerships are not distinguished by race for

the Toledo community in 1920. However, 50.6 percent of the city's

residents, black and white, were renters while 24.4 percent owned their

homes free of encumbrances. The disposition of the remaining percent-

age of homes is not known. In 1923, approximately 12 percent of the

more than 2,000 black families in the city owned their homes free and

15.6 percent were buying their places of residence. More than 72 percent

of the community's black families were renters. It cannot be stated,

however, that these figures reflect all segments of the Afro-American

 

27. Toledo Blade, May 25, July 15, 1920; April 6,1921; February 3, 1922; also see

Toledo City Journal, V, no. 20 (May 15, 1920), 222; Toledo City Journal, IX, no. 1

(January 5, 1924), 7; and The National Association of Housing Officials, Housing and

Redevelopment Directory, 1952-53 (Publication no. N316, September, 1952), 159.

28. Toledo Observer, November 10, 1923; also see U.S. Bureau of the Census,

Fourteenth Census of the United States, Population: 1920, II, Tables 7, 12: 1286-88,

1294-97; and Everett Johnson, "A Study of the Negro Families in the Pinewood Avenue

District of Toledo, Ohio," 243-45.

• 14
 

Newcomers to the City                                                19

 

population. Homeownerships were held primarily by the native Ohio

segment of the population. To these must be added a small group of

newcomers who apparently sold their farms or other property once the

decision to move had been made.²⁹

Among both "older" and "newer" urban residences, there has been,

at least periodically, the necessity to sublease portions of their dwellings

to others. In 1930, the year of available data for lodgers, there were

13,260 Afro-Americans in Toledo. This population included 3,198

families, of which 21.5 percent either owned or were buying their

homes. There is no distinction between those who owned their homes

outright and those with encumbrances. In 1930, 75.6 percent or slightly

more than three-fourths of the city's black families were renters. The

disposition of the remaining 2.9 percent black families is unknown.

Among Negro families who owned their homes (both free and with

mortgages), 32.3 percent or almost one-third subrented to lodgers.

This figure increased to 36.6 percent for black renter families.³⁰

The boarding phenomenon can be further illustrated in a comparative

analysis of black and white residents in Toledo. There were 36,689

native white families of native parentage in the city in 1930. In home-

ownerships, these whites held 40.8 percent free and encumbered homes.

Again, there is no distinction between those who owned their homes

outright and those with encumbrances. However, 58.2 percent of the

city's native white families, both homeowners and tenants, opened their

residences to lodgers. Among Negro families, more than three-fourths

(79 percent) subrented to boarders. This figure represents both home-

owners and tenants and is far above the percentage of native whites

in the combined category who subrented their dwellings. The city's

14,501 foreign families contained only 11.7 percent boarders in 1930.

Moreover, the foreign-born outdistanced Afro-Americans in home-

ownerships, with 39.1 percent in the combined category of free and

encumbered homes and only 61 percent as renters.31

Without a clear distinction of ethnic groups among the foreign-born,

it is uncertain, as with blacks, whether specific nationalities, older

settlers, or newcomers had a greater percentage of owned homes as

well as boarders. At the turn of the century, the German and Irish

communities led all foreign-born and foreign whites (those of mixed

 

29. Toledo Blade, October 27, 1906; Toledo Observer, November 10, 1923; and

Katzman, "The Farmers," 8-10.

30. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Negroes in the United States, 1920-1932, Table 45:

285; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930: Families,

VI (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1933), Tables 5, 73: 67, 1015.

31. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930: Families,

VI, Table 73: 67.

• 15
 

20                                                    OHIO HISTORY

 

parentage) in economic and social development as well as homeowner-

ships. Between 1919 and 1921, there were increasing signs of upward

mobility, particularly in homeownerships, among Polish residents.

They were becoming, stated the Blade, "the greatest buyers of homes."

These homes were being purchased largely in the Lagrange Street

area to the northeast in the city. There is simply no way of determining

the number of lodgers who may have resided in these homes.³²

If black Toledo surpassed both native whites and the foreign-born

in the percentage who had boarders in their dwellings by 1930, so did

it outdistance some other black communities. In the Ohio cities of

Akron, Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, and Youngstown, the percent-

age of both homeowners and tenants who took in boarders did not

equal that among Toledo's Negroes. Similarly, black Toledo residents

surpassed the southern cities of Atlanta and Birmingham in group

percentages who accepted lodgers. Black Toledo resembled the cities of

Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit in the percentage of boarders

within the households of others. A wider gap existed, however, between

these cities and black Toledo in free and encumbered homeownerships.

In Toledo, approximately one-fifth of the Afro-American families

held homes in the combined category. Buffalo's black community

contained only 6.6 percent free and encumbered homes, while Negroes

in Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit held 10.5 percent, 8.3 percent,

and 15 percent, respectively, in this same category. ³³

Despite the differences that obviously existed in the histories and

traditions of such cities as Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and

Toledo, they all shared, at least numerically, in the boarding experience.

To be sure, the category of boarder included a variety of persons having

diverse relationships to the homeowner or holder of a dwelling. And

while such relationships are unknown for the Toledo community, for

example, it is possible that some were extended family members. During

the two decades after 1910, it was not uncommon for recent southern

migrants to seek shelter in the homes of relatives and even acquaintances.

Given the housing shortage in Toledo and other cities, boarding may

have been widespread well before 1930. These, as well as the social and

economic problems that plagued the black community, made boarding

more than a mutual endeavor among blacks to share certain cultural

amenities. In a very real sense, boarding was a necessary institution

 

32. Toledo Blade, August 7, 1919; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Twelfth Census of

the United States, 1900: Population, II, Table 115: 754. In 1900, the German element

in Toledo held 23 percent free homeownerships followed by the Irish and British residents

with 20 percent and 15 percent, respectively.

33. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Negroes in The United States, 1920-1932, Tables 38,

41,43,45:277,281,282-84.

• 16
 

Newcomers to the City                                           21

 

that became a prominent feature among homeowners and tenants alike.

It can also be stated that boarding and its ills or benefits varied widely

from community to community. Moreover, high percentages of board-

ing did not automatically mean equally high rates of homeownerships.

In all, "high rents, the pressures of populations, and the low incomes of

most Negroes were all factors in the large number of boarders."³⁴

 

VI

How, then, did black Toledoans fare in terms of the jobs or occupa-

tions that they held in 1920 and 1930? In 1920, the community's black

female workers constituted 3.3 percent of the total female labor force

in the city. These Negroes, like their counterparts in the decades 1890-

1910, were most heavily concentrated in the domestic and personal

services category of labor. Forty-four percent of all employed black

females were servants in 1920 and they comprised fifteen percent of

all the servants in the city. By contrast, only 10 percent of all employed

white females were servants in the same year. While information on the

ethnic backgrounds of these whites is unavailable, it is possible that

sizeable numbers continued to be those of "newer immigrant groups"

such as the Austro-Hungarians and the Russians. In the category of

laundress, more than 31 percent of all the employed black females held

jobs while only 1.7 percent of the employed white females were laun-

dresses. In the broad and dubious category of mechanical trades,

5.6 percent of the employed black females held jobs. For the most part,

this percentage represented the opening of greater opportunities in

industry for Negro females. When compared to their white counterparts,

however, blacks trailed by more than 20 percent in the mechanical

trades.35

In the second decade of the twentieth century, Afro-American males

evidenced slight improvement in the jobs they held. These advances

came as a result of increased industrial development in the city. In 1910,

less than one-half of one percent of the employed black males were

iron molders, founders, and casters. With the economic growth pro-

duced by the First World War, Negro males comprised slightly more

than one percent of all the city's workers in these same jobs in 1920.

Moreover, approximately 11.0 percent of all the employed black males

in 1920 were iron molders, founders, and casters. In the city's auto-

mobile factories, Afro-Americans comprised 7.0 percent of the unspeci-

 

34. Ibid.; Toledo Blade, April 6, 1921, February 3, 1922; Toledo Observer,

November 10, 1923; also see Long and Johnson, People vs Property, 3-4.

35. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920:

Occupation, IV, Table 2: 1243-45.

• 17
 

22                                                    OHIO HISTORY

 

fied laborers. Even as laborers, blacks were negligible in the automobile

industry in 1910. A decade later, 2.5 percent of the city's mechanics

were Negroes. As semi-skilled and skilled operatives within the auto-

mobile factories, the Afro-American's share of the total jobs stood at

slightly more than one percent. Black males were conspicuously absent

from the ranks of machinists and there were few Negro apprentices

in any of the semi- and skilled categories of labor between 1910 and

1930. This combined with a general exclusion of blacks from organized

labor to pose a double hardship in access to higher-paying jobs. Afro-

American males continued a long-standing concentration in primarily

three job classifications. They comprised 48 percent of Toledo's "street,

railroad, and store laborers," 27 percent of all the jobs as janitors, and

two-thirds of the non-store porters in 1920. Comparatively, white

males, as a group, did not evidence such concentration in any of these

categories.36

By 1930, Negro males increased their slightly less than three percent

of the total labor force in 1920 to more than five percent. Yet, blacks,

other than laborers, janitors, porters, servants, and waiters, witnessed

little movement into the semi-skilled occupations. Indeed, there was a

greater concentration in the unskilled categories as blacks now com-

prised 82 percent of the city's porters and 31 percent of its janitors. In

the category of iron molder, founder, and caster, employed black males

decreased from 11 percent in 1920 to less than 5 percent by 1930. In that

same year, Negro females came to dominate the category of servant.

These workers comprised 61 percent of the entire servant class, with

more than one-fourth (27 percent) of all employed black females listed

as servants. Similarly, Afro-American females continued their concen-

tration as laundresses and non-factory laundry operatives. They also

came to dominate the category of "elevator operator" by holding

62 percent of Toledo's total jobs of this classification. At the same time,

Negro females declined from 5.6 percent of the mechanical trades to

one percent in 1930. Among white males and females, such concentra-

tion in certain categories and under-representation in others did not

exist, at least for the opening year of the century's third decade.37

Between 1920 and 1930, the economic conditions among black resi-

dents in Toledo evidenced change or improvement in some areas and

greater concentration in the more traditional areas of Afro-American

employment. The growing industrialization in the city brought limited

opportunities for many Negroes, especially as classified laborers.

 

36. Ibid.

37. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States, IV, Table 12:

1294-97.

• 18
 

Newcomers to the City                                         23

 

Undoubtedly, some newcomers saw this as a move upward from their

previous economic conditions in the south. For others, the circle only

tightened as the socioeconomic walls of a new and often strange world

closed in upon them. In the clerical and professional classes of work,

approximately one percent of the black Toledo population held jobs in

1920 and 1930. These represented the limits of the white collar occupa-

tions within the black community. Comparatively, the total statewide

percentage of blacks in these two job classifications stood a little above

two percent in 1920. The decline in industrial-related jobs for blacks

in 1930 reflected the opening years of the Great Depression. As jobs

decreased among all workers, they took a sharp downward turn in the

Negro community. Some workers had just begun to inch their way into

the "time clock" routine of the industrial order as semi-skilled operatives

when the bottom fell out of the economy. With this economic crisis at

the close of the century's third decade, blacks could do little more than

increase their already disproportionate share of the lowest-paying and

most menial jobs. In time, even these forms of labor would be at a

premium.38

 

VII

Despite the increases in population and the growing restrictions in

housing, Toledo did not experience the violence that erupted in many

cities across the nation after 1916. There are several reasons for this.

While the Afro-American population mushroomed in the decades after

1910, blacks continued to comprise a relatively small part of the total

population, 2.3 percent in 1920 and 4.6 percent by 1930. And while

gradient size alone cannot explain the lack of racial violence, it is

significant to note that the black community remained extremely small

in absolute numbers. In housing there was little or no competition

for available dwellings, as blacks were either "warned out" or restricted

from areas with substantial white populations. The succession process

in housing appears to have operated relatively well as the small Negro

population came to hold the abandoned neighborhoods and housing

of the larger society, especially in the southwest or Pinewood area of

the city. In jobs and occupations, only the issue of black imported labor

by the railroads became the focal point-for a brief period in 1917-

of opposition by the city's Central Labor Union. Through tradition

and conventional racial attitudes, black workers did not play a role in

the efforts of organized labor, even as strikebreakers. In the main, the

 

38. Ibid.; Spurgeon Bell and Ralph J. Watkins, Industrial and Commercial Ohio, I

(The Ohio State University: Bureau of Business Research, College of Commerce and

Administration, 1928), 148, 165-68.

• 19
 

24                                                       OHIO HISTORY

 

great majority of Afro-Americans continued, as their pre-1910 counter-

parts had done, to hold non-union, menial, and unskilled jobs. And

as already noted, there were few apprentices being trained for other and

higher levels of employment. In all, black Toledoans did not seriously

threaten either the social or economic position of whites. 39

From within the largely all black world, "older settlers" remained

relatively silent in their criticism of any negative aspects wrought by the

growth in population. Still, there may have been those who lamented

the arrival of newcomers and the subsequent strain, both social and

economic, upon urban living. Others, such as Reverand Benjamin

McWilliams of Third Baptist Church, Mrs. W. F. Kennedy, Albertus

Brown, and Elvin B. Wanzo, bent all efforts in reaching out to the

new arrivals, particularly in religious and social areas. In 1925,

McWilliams instituted a series of "tent meetings" to inform blacks of

available community services and to urge newcomers to find church

homes. Churchmen and women, stated McWilliams, should take the

lead in any effort to "acclimatize" former rural, southern Negroes

"to the rather strenuous urban life in the North."⁴⁰

The growth of Toledo's black population, by more than 336 percent

between 1910 and 1930, warrants a final note. Afro-American migrants

appeared willing to "put down roots" in this northwest Ohio community

and call it home. And while there were new problems and even signs

of repression in the city, the growth in population of AfroAmerican

residents is suggestive of a personal understanding among these new-

comers of the human and even spiritual implications conveyed in the

following migrant folk tale:

 

An unemployed black migrant, cold, wet, and hungry, appealed to God for

advice. GO BACK TO MISSISSIPPI, the Lord told him. You don't mean it,

Lord, the poor man replied, you're jesting. The Lord repeated, GO BACK TO

MISSISSIPPI! Finally, the man relented: very well, Lord, if you insist, I'll go.

But will you go with me? The Lord answered: AS FAR AS CINCINNATI.⁴¹

 

The tide of southern black migrants continued.

 

39. Toledo Blade, June 1, 1917; Toledo Union Leader, May 10, 1918; and Toledo

Blade, April 28, 1919.

40. Ibid.; Toledo Blade, May 22, 1917; Toledo Blade, July 18, 1925; Charles M.

Brunson, A History of the Toledo Council of Churches (Toledo, Ohio: May 17, 1937),

26-27, in Local History Room, Toledo-Lucas County Public Library; Toledo Newsbee,

September 5, 22, 1925; The Ohio Christian News, October 29, 1926; and Benjamin F.

McWilliams, "Interracial Activities in Toledo," Southern Workman, 54 (April, 1925),

162-65.

41. Stanley Coben, "The Failure of the Melting Pot," quoted in Thomas R.

Frazier, ed., The Underside of American History: Other Readings, Second Edition,

Volume II: Since 1865 (New York, 1974), 156.

• 20