Dayton Daily News Library
VOICES OF HISTORY
Postwar surge shifts racial tide
Story by John Keilman
Photos by Lisa Powell DAYTON DAILY NEWS
Series -
Third of 5 parts
Published: Tuesday, February 16, 1999
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Edition: CITY
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Section: NEWS
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Page: 1A
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The postwar years brought an unprecedented rush of prosperity to America.
Returning veterans flooded colleges, corporations and factories, their
brainpower and labor transforming the nation into the world's premier economic
superpower.
Yet most of the country's blacks were denied a fair piece of this bountiful
pie. Many were no longer willing to accept that. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme
Court ruled that segregated public schools violated the Constitution. A year
later, housekeeper Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus, sparking a
boycott that kick-started the modern civil rights movement and vaulted Martin
Luther King Jr. to prominence. There was much to overcome. In Dayton, nearly
all blacks lived south of Wolf Creek, their efforts to settle in other areas
thwarted by nervous bankers and real estate agents. But people like Ned Wood
gradually did move, only to watch whites stream to the suburbs.
Racial brutality accelerated in the South as many whites sensed power
shifting. Yvonne Walker-Taylor, whose life in Wilberforce was largely
discrimination-free, experienced this cruelty when she spent two summers
teaching in South Carolina.
Still, progress was made. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights
Act of 1965. These inspired thousands of blacks to cast ballots for the first
time.
Many attitudes seemed to change as well. Ellen Lee Jackson moved from
Dayton to Tennessee and found her new white neighbors congenial. George Cooper
became Dayton's first black city government department head. The advances
didn't mean the end of violence. A series of urban riots erupted across the
country, including one in Dayton in 1966 that doomed much of a West Dayton
commercial district to abandonment.
But the convulsions had done their work. As the 1960s ended, equality was
the law, and America was a new nation.
Today's interviews: Tracing the upheaval of the '60s
Copyright, Dayton Daily News.
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