Shades of a bygone era
During Black History Month, civil rights leaders recall their fights and victories.
Published Friday, February 21, 2003
Wynna Faye Elbert, 58, looks out of her office window in the Armory downtown and sees the Boone County Courthouse, where in 1923 a mob burst in, grabbed James T. Scott, a janitor suspected of rape, and lynched him.
Down the street to her right, a row of shops and homes represented the core of Columbia’s black community until urban renewal cleared them out in the 1960s.
Across the street and down the road, Woolworth’s refused to serve blacks who sat at the counter.
The civil rights movement changed the face of Columbia. And as the civil rights leaders’ faces crease with age, many of them are realizing that unless they tell of struggles and victories in Columbia’s black history, those lessons might be forgotten.
The conflicts civil rights activists speak of today are remarkably similar to what people faced back then: calls from peace activists answered by calls for supporting our troops, demands for equality and fairness answered by arguments supporting property rights, individual relationships in contrast to larger issues and ideals.
As complicated as that sounds, in the ’50s and ’60s in Columbia, it came down to a fight for basic rights: to live in a decent home, to have the opportunity to try clothes on before buying them or even to order a soft drink from the front counter of a diner.
"My oldest son, John, wanted to sit at the counter and order one of those colorful, bubbly drinks at Woolworth’s," said Beatrice Kelly, 79, who lives in Miles Manor, Columbia’s first racially integrated subdivision. "I told him, ‘We can’t. They won’t serve us.’ So he asked, ‘Why are we buying these other things here?’ "
Kelly, whose late husband, John, was the first black sergeant for the Columbia Police Department, didn’t take part in the sit-ins at Woolworth’s, which was on Broadway between Seventh and Eighth streets.
"The pastor at church said, ‘Even if they pour ketchup on your head, you don’t do anything,’ " Kelly recalled. "I didn’t go. I couldn’t just sit there and do nothing."
The Kellys, Earl and Clara Miles, George and Mildred Brooks and others weren’t marching and demonstrating in the ’50s and ’60s. They were pushing to break the color barrier in housing.
Urban renewal threatened to clear out many homes in town, most of them occupied by blacks, Elbert said.
Many blacks had only three options: leave town, move into public housing or try to build a home. Many viewed the Miles Manor subdivision as their first real opportunity to live in housing that equaled the quality of white housing.
Earl and Clara Miles were renting a two-bedroom home for $3 a week when the home’s owner, a black teacher at Douglass School, decided to sell.
"We wanted to live in something nicer," said Earl Miles, who worked as a cook at the Wigwam restaurant in 1959. "Blacks never had anything. You always worked for white men. It wasn’t a whole lot of years out of slavery. You wanted to do better."
Clara Miles — who is recovering from a recent heart attack — had a dream that they would build a house of their own. Eventually, the pair found a man named Marvin "Blue" Harvey, who agreed to sell 27 acres southwest of the city that could be developed into a subdivision.
Because blacks had trouble securing loans, the Mileses, the Brookses and other families formed a corporation to pay for the lots and pushed the city to extend streets and utilities out to Miles Manor, which is in southwest Columbia, within sight of Schnucks grocery store. "They didn’t want no black people building houses at that end of town," Beatrice Kelly said.
Local peace and civil rights activist John Schuder regards the families who broke the neighborhood color barriers as the true pioneers in Columbia’s civil rights movement.
Schuder, a member of the International Fellowship for Reconciliation, said many of the same people who showed up for civil rights rallies also showed up for anti-war rallies. Schuder said Martin Luther King Jr.’s influence helped keep both efforts peaceful in Columbia.
Though Schuder and Liz Schmidt are white, they fought alongside black activists for the advancement of blacks in Columbia.
Schmidt moved from Iowa to Columbia in 1953, when the race issue was heating up.
"I think most of the blacks here thought if us liberal people would go away, everything would be OK," said Schmidt, 73. "They were maids or workers for individual people, and they knew the" white "families, and they thought we were messing things up."
Schmidt said when she arrived in town, she noticed the ramshackle houses that lined Third Street, now Providence Road. She said she learned that most of the occupants were blacks who worked for whites and were paid just enough to keep those homes.
"The idea was that you would never starve because the boss would feed your babies," Schmidt said. "But you would never step out of bounds."
At the same time, social planners were honing their wrecking balls to commence urban renewal, which condemned many such shacks and even above-average homes and businesses.
Elbert views urban renewal as an instrument that splintered the core of Columbia’s black business district and decentralized the black community.
While researching information for her master’s degree project, Elbert found that in 1927, 65 percent of Columbia’s blacks owned homes. Now, she says, only 10 percent do.
She said many minorities were forced into housing projects.
"There just weren’t any decent houses in the city limits," said Mildred Brooks, who still lives in the Miles Manor subdivision with her husband, George.
Even now, blacks and whites are surprised by the familiarity they shared, in spite of institutional racism.
Recently, members of Shannon Lester’s Hickman High School English class were surprised to learn that blacks sold the Ku Klux Klan water for 25 cents a bucket during Klan rallies on the county fairground property. That site was the location upon which Hickman was built in the 1920s.
Elbert and Bill Thompson, who are collecting oral histories from blacks in Columbia, gave a presentation on local black history to Lester’s class Wednesday. Elbert said that at the end of the rallies, the Klansmen would give their leftover food to the blacks along Providence.
Elbert said the blacks knew who in town belonged to the Klan. "It was hard not to know what someone was involved with if you’re working in their house," she told Lester’s class.
"You would be washing his robe," Hickman senior Trinstan Jones said.
Reach Dave Moore at (573) 815-1708 or firstname.lastname@example.org.
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