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BGSU
student’s film traces school desegregation in southern
Ohio town
The story of how African-American families in a small southern
Ohio farming town desegregated their public schools through
community action is told in a new documentary by a BGSU student
filmmaker.
“Community Crusaders: Desegregation in Hillsboro, Ohio,”
by Shelly Howard, a senior from Norwalk, will be shown at
4:30 p.m. Wednesday (Feb. 26) in the Gish Film Theater, located
on the first floor of Hanna Hall. The film screening will
be followed by a question and answer session with Howard.
The filmmaker is a secondary education major and a student
in the University’s Honors Program. Her documentary
captures on film the recollections of community leaders and
the now-adult children who made civil rights history by forcing
their local school board to obey the law.
Howard recorded 12 hours of interviews for her 60-minute film
about the families who, with the aid of the NAACP, brought
the first lawsuit against a rural school in Ohio—and
the North--after the U.S. Supreme Court’s “Brown
vs. Board of Education” decision.
It was in May of 1954 that the Supreme Court struck down the
“separate but equal” standard that had segregated
students into “black” and “white”
schools in the North and South alike since 1890s. When confronted,
the Hillsboro School Board, however, argued that existing
school buildings couldn’t accommodate all of the town’s
elementary school pupils. Elementary students of color must
continue to attend the segregated Lincoln School.
Howard’s documentary reveals the black community’s
persistence in seeking their civil rights--particularly the
persistent mothers, who were adamant about keeping their children
out of Lincoln School.
Built in 1869, the school was ill equipped with out-dated,
hand-me-down books and school supplies. Before the civil rights
struggle was over, Lincoln School was set ablaze, further
deteriorating the already weary-worn facility.
As Howard’s film recounts, initially the Hillsboro School
Board, and later the courts, refused to enforce the U.S. Supreme
Court decision.
At the start of the new school year in September of 1954,
the Africa-American mothers began marching their children
to Washington or Webster Schools every day, and every day
they and their children were turned away at the schoolhouse
doors and told to go to Lincoln School.
Although the school board marked the black students truant
when they did not go to Lincoln School, the families held
their stance. They taught their children themselves at home
or brought in Quaker teachers from nearby Wilmington, who
tutored them.
The Ohio NAACP, which had been watching the school board’s
actions closely, decided to use the community as a test case
of the desegregation decision. Thurgood Marshall and Constance
Baker Motley, who at that time were both members of the legal
staff at the NAACP’s national headquarters, assisted
two Dayton attorneys working on the case.
The case was not as easy to win as the NAACP anticipated.
It took two years of verbal battles on school sidewalks and
in Cincinnati courtrooms before the fight ended. Finally,
the Hillsboro Board of Education obliged a court order in
April 1956 to obey Ohio law and allow integration of its elementary
schools.
According to Liette Gidlow, history, Howard’s
documentary is an important one.
“Very little research had been done on the Hillsboro
case, which is historically significant because it was the
first test case in the North of the U.S. Supreme Court’s
Brown v. Board decision that struck down the ‘separate
but equal’ standard that had governed education since
the 1890s,” Gidlow said.
The story is also a dramatic one. By having the people who
lived it tell their own story, Howard has saved oral history
from being lost to future generations, Gidlow explained.
Howard, whose concentration in secondary education is integrated
social studies, including history, initially stumbled across
the case when she was looking for a project topic in a history
class last spring taught by Gidlow.
“There was a footnote about the case in the book, ‘Milestones:
A History of the State Board of Education of Ohio.’
It looked interesting because segregation was being practiced
but it was against Ohio law,” Howard recounted.
She poured through copies of court testimony, NAACP files
and press accounts of the proceedings to get a good picture
of the case and write a scholarly paper about it.
“There wasn’t very much written about it so I
read a lot of original sources. There weren’t any other
(school desegregation) cases until the late sixties and early
seventies,” the student film-maker said.
As her research continued, she became interested talking with
the people involved and learning about how they felt about
their experiences. So this fall Howard decided to collect
oral history interviews about the case for her senior honors
thesis, taking on the challenge of learning to use a digital
video camera and computer digital editing software.
On Feb. 15, the documentary received its first public screening
at the Highland County District Library in Hillsboro, which
is located about 50 miles east of Cincinnati and the around
same distance southeast of Dayton and south of Columbus.
The showing, sponsored by the community’s African American
Awareness Research Council, was presented as part of Black
History Month activities. The council, Howard said, not only
wanted to increase awareness of their community’s role
in civil rights history but also raise funds to purchase a
historical marker for the former site of Lincoln School, which
was torn down a number of years ago.
To help them raise money, Howard is making copies of the research
paper and her documentary film available for purchase, with
profits going to the council’s fund.
A 1998 graduate of St. Paul’s High School in Norwalk,
Howard plans to teach social studies, including history, after
she graduates from BGSU in May.
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