Black History

This Sunday the Jeremy Winston Chorale will perform their concert “Black Bodies, Black Bones.” This features the Ohio premiere of Fortune’s Bones: A Manumission Requiem. David Seitz traces Fortune’s story and the music.

This weekend a teenager from Chicago flew solo into Greene County. He visited Wilberforce University. It is a historically Black university he said played a significant role in the history of Black aviation.

Wilberforce University is the first Black-owned and operated college in the United States. It was founded when slavery was still legal. The school will celebrate the 166th graduating class on Saturday. WYSO’s Mike Frazier spoke with Wilberforce University President, Dr. Elfred Anthony Pinkard about the school’s rich history, how it overcame recent financial and accreditation challenges, and his message to the class of ‘22.

Two groups in Dayton, OH collaborate for the first time helping Black artists bring their work to a larger portion of the public.

Jordan Anderson was a freed slave living in Dayton, OH with his family after the Civil War. He was owned by a man named PH Anderson in Big Spring, Tennessee. After receiving a letter from his former slave master asking him to return, Anderson responded with a letter of his own. WYSO producer Basim Blunt talks to Dayton historian Dr. Larry Crowe about the famous Jordan Anderson letter.

You have probably heard about the new statue, sculpted by Brian Maughan, of Wheeling Gaunt who was once enslaved and became an important leader in Yellow Springs. David Seitz tells us the story of the statue, the sculptor, and the Maughan family.

Visitors to Yellow Springs may notice something new: a life size bronze statue of Wheeling Gaunt. Many people may know of this once enslaved man’s gift of yearly flour and sugar for widows. Yet there’s much more.

The nonprofit Early Visions hosted a vintage tea party to honor the women of West Dayton. WYSO spoke with attendees about their memories of the West Dayton YWCA, the first African American YWCA in the country.

The West Dayton nonprofit Early Visions is working to preserve the building that once housed the first African American YWCA in the country.

In 2014, Loud As The Rolling Sea guest host Dr. Kevin McGruder spent a warm summer afternoon talking to Jewel Graham in a wide ranging oral history interview that covered pretty much her whole life. She was a much loved faculty member at Antioch College for many years, deeply involved in supporting the Black students in the Antioch program for interracial education during turbulent times.

Now in his 90s, Paul Graham is a soft spoken, retired chemist living in Yellow Springs, where he went to college, launched a career and a family, and eventually became a prominent civil rights activist. His parents had come north, like so many blacks in the early 20th century, and moved to Dayton, where they joined other family members and settled down.

In this installment, we’ll hear about student activism in the 1960s and 70s in Greene County, home to two historically Black colleges – Central State and Wilberforce University AND Antioch College. Students at all three schools organized protests, marches, sit-ins, rallies, pickets and more during those years, pressing hard and relentlessly for civil rights for African Americans.