Black History

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.

This Saturday Dayton and many communities across the Miami Valley will hold Juneteenth celebrations that mark the end of slavery in the United States. Eichelberger Center for Community Voices Senior Producer Basim Blunt interviewed local historian Larry Crowe to get some details about Juneteenth.

A conversation with Omope Cater Daboiku about The Association for the Study of African American Life and History

Senior producer Basim Blunt of the Eichelberger Center for Community Voices introduces us to Larry Crowe, an oral historian, fine artist and community activist from Dayton. Mr. Crowe has interviewed more than 15 hundred African Americans for the HistoryMakers, an oral history project collecting stories from around the world.

Wilberforce University was founded in 1856, making it the oldest, private, historically Black college.

Since the 1970s, February is observed as Black History Month in the U.S. to honor the achievements of Black Americans. For the next few weeks, the Eichelberger Center for Community Voices at WYSO will look at the genesis of Black history Month AND bring us the voices of some local black historians and story keepers, too.

The National Park Service has awarded the Dayton nonprofit Early Visions $500,000 to preserve the site of the country’s first African American YWCA. The…

The Wesley Community Center’s annual Juneteenth festival in Dayton was cancelled this year due to COVID-19. But following the killing of George Floyd and…