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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 ; Edition: CITY ; Section: NEWS ; Page: 1A .
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


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