Loud As The Rolling Sea is WYSO's series that began with a community oral history project in Yellow Springs over a decade ago. It highlights the stories of local civil rights activists born in the 1920s and 30s.
In honor of Black History Month, we air a new episode of Loud as the Rolling Sea every Friday this month.
Today, we present a conversation with series producer Dr. Kevin McGruder and the late Leanora Brown.
Leonora Deveaux Brown
Kevin McGruder: Leonora Deveaux Brown was born in 1933 in Wheeling, West Virginia. Her father was an Army chaplain, so the family moved frequently. During World War II, her father was assigned to Fort Huachuca in Arizona, and the family lived with her grandmother in Florida.
What was life in Jacksonville [Florida] like?
Leonora Brown: We were definitely in a segregated setting. Within our neighborhood, there was nothing but Black people. You felt it when you rode downtown on the bus or when you went into stores and when you were dealing with people who had to work in a segregated setting.
McGruder: You mentioned riding the bus. So the buses were segregated, and you sat in the back of the bus?
Brown: It's interesting to me when I read that people paid their fare, got off, and went in the back. I never had that experience. We always just went in the front, paid your fare, and went and sat in the back.
McGruder: The family next moved to Fort Riley, Kansas.
And what was Kansas like?
Brown: It was enjoyable. We lived on the post. But...Kansas had a subtle way of segregating at that time. We all went to the same school but you didn't eat in integrated places. Even at the school, the Black children naturally were involved in sports, but they were not in the plays or social activities that were going on.
They just gave her a fit.Leonora Brown on how Elizabeth Hatcher, the first Black person to teach in Yellow Springs' integrated schools after 1954, was treated.
McGruder: After college, Leonora married Orlando Brown, and the couple settled in Yellow Springs, where Mrs. Brown's uncle, Richard Phillips, lived. She taught in the Dayton Public Schools, which had begun taking tentative steps to integrate their teaching staffs and student bodies in the aftermath of the 1954 Brown versus Board of Education Supreme Court decision that concluded that racial segregation had no place in public schools.
Brown: I used to tell my class, 'I'm the only black person in this room.' But I didn't suffer from that. The parents, some of them, would come and observe you, but they didn't have any hostility, that kind of thing. For the most part, ever thereafter, I was in an integrated school; I never went back to just a Black school.
McGruder: Mrs. Brown also witnessed the challenges faced by Elizabeth Hatcher, who in the fall of 1956 had been hired by Yellow Springs schools. She was the first Black teacher hired in the school system since 1887, when Ohio schools were required to desegregate their student bodies. In Yellow Springs, the Black teachers who had taught at the Black schools lost their jobs.
Did you feel the civil rights movement or things happening in Yellow Springs?
Brown: To a degree.
At the time that we were out there, there weren't any Black teachers in Yellow Springs. The first [Black] teacher naturally...what happens to the first person in a situation is that...people can't live happily ever after. They just gave her a fit.
But now things seem to be, you know, pretty smooth.
McGruder: Leonora and Orlando Brown raised three sons, Vernon, Allen, and Martin, in Yellow Springs. With her husband, Mrs. Brown was an active member of the Central Chapel AME Church in Yellow Springs, where she served on the stewardess board and the senior choir. She lived to the age of 84.
Support for Loud As The Rolling Sea comes from the Yellow Springs Community Foundation. Loud As The Rolling Sea is produced at the Eichelberger Center for Community Voices at WYSO.
