Abstract
Bruce Melville discusses his involvement with various civil rights organizations in the early 1960s. He comments extensively also on the Hough/Glenville areas, particularly pertaining to school segregation.
Loading...
Interviewee
Melville, Bruce (interviewee)
Interviewer
Kaeser, Susan (interviewer)
Project
Project Team
Date
11-18-2014
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
84 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Bruce Melville Interview, 18 November 2014" (2014). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 999122.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/736
Transcript
Susan Kaeser [00:00:00] Start with, you know, where did you grow up?
Bruce Melville [00:00:02] Okay, alright, quick, a quick one on that. The early years were in the northeast part of Cleveland. My elementary school years were in what I think is officially the Wildwood. That’s Voinovich’s neighborhood.
Susan Kaeser [00:00:18] Oh, yeah.
Bruce Melville [00:00:19] You know, between almost, yeah, half a block from the lake. Great place to grow up. Went to OH Perry [School]. Kindergarten through 6th grade. Got a wonderful education. I think. I think the Cleveland schools were great then. And I ended up- I was in- I didn’t really realize the class that I was in until that was- Well, yeah, they didn’t call it that, but it was because there were six of us out of our grade that went into this, you know, Mrs. Gates, Miss Gates’s class. And I mean, we got oral French in 5th and 6th. We were in there for two years. And we did other stuff that I thought was really great and maybe relevant to this. I believe it was in second grade. And I’ve got some documentation on this. A unit of our study was early Cleveland history, second grade. And I still got- And drawing a map of Public Square in second grade. You know, who does that anymore, you know? Anyway, elementary school, then my middle school years, we lived in Springfield, Illinois. So that was kind of a diversion. But another perspective, we moved back here and to Lyndhurst for my high school year. So that was at Brush [High School]. It was, you might imagine at that time, an all-white school. It was reasonably well balanced, you know, Protestant, Catholic. Catholic, Jew. But that was it. Yeah, that was it. And yeah, my parents were, should I say, appropriately Republican for the social milieu that they wanted to be a part of. Is that a good way to put it? Okay, so we really didn’t much talk about politics growing up. We really didn’t. I think my dad had trouble. He could talk about engineering stuff and he taught me, you know, Ohm’s law and Kirchhoff’s law and all that kind of stuff. But stuff that had real substance to it was more of a problem for him. So we didn’t really get into anything that might be controversial. And so I really, you know, I- By the time I went seven miles down Mayfield Road to college, you know, I was living in an all-white world, oblivious to social issues. I really think I was.
Susan Kaeser [00:02:45] So. But you seem to have a very deep moral compass. So where do you think that came from?
Bruce Melville [00:02:52] Well, you know, and I gotta give my parents some credit, you know, even if it was an unspoken thing, you know. I mean, yeah, we were always, you know, in church on Sunday. And they were obviously seeing messages. They were Presbyterian, so there were probably a lot of unspoken messages that I just absorbed, you know, kind of just the way it. The way it was in that. That era.
Susan Kaeser [00:03:17] Is there any chance your parents were FDR Republicans?
Bruce Melville [00:03:22] No, I- You know, we never talked about that. Remember an inkling that they would have supported Robert Taft or the Republican in what, ’52, rather than Eisenhower? But I just. I picked up these things rather than. We weren’t really discussing these things. I just. Memories that stick in my brain. But I would say that a good. A significant part of the credit would go to the campus protestant group, which had. So, you know, I ventured, oh, well, you know, these religious preference cards that we used to fill out. I don’t know if you still do that or not. Okay. Anyway, every freshman filled out a religious preference card, you know, and of course, it was Protestant, Catholic, Jews. That was it. Right? So I just- Protestant, okay. And they were distributed to the campus organizations. And so. So I was contacted Becky Ely, later Becky Edward. And so I started showing up at the student Christian Union later UCM, and later something else I can’t quite remember that met in the ground floor of the Church of the Covenant.
Susan Kaeser [00:04:42] So is that 1962?
Bruce Melville [00:04:45] No, that is the fall of ’58. Oh, my God. Yeah. So, you know. You know, and I got to admit that much, that was the last year that Case Tech, this is pre merger now. That Case Tech was an all male school. So I got to admit that part of my motive, I wasn’t a fraternity member now, was meeting some Mather [college] co-eds. But they. Their programs, this was. This was, I think, a period of term that was used for it. I don’t know. But anyway, churches were becoming very involved in social action and civil rights. Was, I think, kind of the issue of the times. So, you know, through our Sunday evening programs, I began to be exposed to people talking about the issues in the community surrounding University Circle, which was kind of a cultural island. We ventured off campus back a little, practically more not to. So, for example, I started participating in inner-city work-study weekends.
Susan Kaeser [00:06:08] Explain that.
Bruce Melville [00:06:09] Okay. One, for example, there was- There was then an organization called the Inner City Protestant Parish, IPP. And it was- It was an effort on the part of main, what we then called mainline Protestantism, to support, I think, their denomination in the city, the church, which is now in the building, I think it’s St. Philip’s Christian Church, was Alan Davis’s congregation for a time at the corner of East 30th and Central. Anyway, back then they were meeting in a storefront the church was in the storefront on one side of Cedar or Central, probably, and kind of there was in another storefront on the other side of the street. Anyway, we were going to do some voter registration, I think maybe on Saturday, actually, I slept on a pew in that storefront that night. We were hearing from people in the neighborhood, and we were hearing from people who were involved in the neighborhood. It’s hard for all. It’s got to be hard for you to realize what our community was like then. We really, really were divided. We didn’t do the sort of things you take for granted now anyway, so this was kind of an eye opener for me.
Susan Kaeser [00:07:48] So you were being in this central city was. You were divided and not having access to that. And here you went and went to this church, and that put you in the middle of it.
Bruce Melville [00:07:57] Right. So this. Right. So, I mean, so the programs conducted by the Student Christian Union became my liberal education, right? So I lasted two years at Case. But by my sophomore year, you know, I was already kind of losing interest in engineering and becoming more and more interested in what I was learning about the surrounding world. And this is probably a kind of evangelism, I suppose. But here’s the word. You know, as we students at SCU, we’re doing what we call deputations, that act, as we begin, began to learn about the evils of discrimination and particularly the vicious cycle of discrimination. And I’ve got. I still got one of the visuals. We were going out to Protestant churches, some of the churches who were supporting the campus work of SCU. And we were giving. We were giving these talks on the vicious cycle of discrimination and how it manifested itself in Cleveland or greater Cleveland. Okay. So we started doing this sort of thing. Now suburban? Yeah. Well, both, actually, but basically white. Yeah, white congregations. Now, a really, I would say a pivotal experience for me. And I’ve got copies. Let me put this on the table here. That’s got lots of documents in it. Okay. Okay. That’s my flash. SCU, I started to- I eventually got involved in kind of the inner group and, and the student leadership at SCU, we held retreats three times a year. And there was always the spring retreat was when the new officers would be kind of installed. And we planned to think about the following student year. In the spring of ’61, Becky Ely was getting married. So she was leading the- She was the number two person on staff. And they were considering hiring another fellow who was just finishing up at the Yale Divinity School. And so they invited him to attend. They invited him to attend our spring retreat. It happened to be- That was- I was, I was becoming president of the other, the campus student president. Anyway, and so that’s when we met. Bruce Klunder graduated, and he was- And we loved him and he was hired. So he moved to Cleveland over the summer of ’61, and he became the number two, the associate executive secretary Robert (?), I think it was the proper title under Bob Clark, who was the executive director secretary. He and George Lee, who was the Episcopal Reverend George Lee, who was the Episcopal chaplain on campus, began to plan a study trip, a study trip to the south, which was to be spring break of ’62. This was exactly one year after the bloody Freedom Ride, which they don’t have to go into detail on that. Our purpose was to get a firsthand look at the progress of civil rights in the South. Okay, so this is a very carefully planned trip coordinated with an Episcopal group s group, Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity, based on Atlanta.
Susan Kaeser [00:12:04] I think they sponsored Martin Luther King coming to St. Paul’s in ’63.
Bruce Melville [00:12:10] Oh, okay. Alright.
Susan Kaeser [00:12:11] It was the national and not the local.
Bruce Melville [00:12:14] Ah, okay. Alight.
Susan Kaeser [00:12:16] That was an interesting thing for me to learn, actually.
Bruce Melville [00:12:18] I think I was present.
Susan Kaeser [00:12:20] I bet you were.
Bruce Melville [00:12:21] I want to hear about that. Okay. Alright. So we had two minibuses borrowed from, I think, the Edison Road YMCA with, you know, Sid Addison wrote YMCA. And we- It’s kind of, kind of like nothing more conspicuous than an unmarked police car, you know. Well, this was- We went to the morning we departed. We got some sort of basically butcher paper as a local. I think it was the Fisher Food recommendation campus there, and taped it over. Well, you know, this made us even more conspicuous to have this brown, you know, plain brown wrapper on our, on our vehicles. So these- So Bruce drove one of the vehicles and I drove the other one, and it was his wife, Joanne went along, too. And Renford Gaines and Harold Washington were two African Americans who were along this trip with us. Now, this is the spring of ’62, going south. Admittedly not the Deep South, but this was an interracial route to minibuses. Okay. First overnight. Well, this is a light overview of this. You can read up. What we had decided is that each of us would record one day of this trip when it got to be my day. Basically, I didn’t stop recording. And every day after that, I also recorded myself. So a large part of the notes are from my perspective. Anyway, a quick overview of this. We spent the night in Knoxville. We apparently almost got ourselves into trouble at the place where we ate that evening. Apparently, the Harold and Rennie quickly kind of- They were tuned into things that we were oblivious to, and they sensed a mood there that says, we better get up and leave right now. So we did. We spent five days in Atlanta. Again, it was well-planned. We had scheduled meetings with, with quite a, quite an array of persons of some relevance to civil rights in Atlanta at that time, including Ralph McGill, then the editor of the Atlanta Constitution. I wasn’t- We kind of split up. We didn’t all go to everything, and I didn’t go to that particular one, but I believe we were all, we were all present at the SCLC office right on Auburn Avenue. And Doctor King was there, even though we didn’t really meet with him, we- And I think there was another student group president at the same time. We did get to meet him. At any rate, that was kind of some other planned activities during those five days, which are kind of written up, but I’ll pass along to you. On the way back. The other important part of our trip was in Nashville, and we must have spent a couple days there. If you know the history of that time, there was a lot going on. Well, it was that- It was that time. That time, yeah. But it was, you know, from a student perspective, so. Yes. And we were on the Fisk campus, and that one evening we met with a group of us sitting around Wolf’s bigger tables than this, but not much bigger. We met with some of the leaders of SNCC. I was sitting across the table from a student by the name of John Lewis, who was only six months older than mine. He was a student. I was a student. And alongside of him was another student named Bernard Lafayette. And we were hearing from them firsthand about the philosophy of nonviolent existence firsthand. And that was probably the most, you know, pivotal part of the trip for me, firsthand. We met with some others, and anyway, we were back in Cleveland ten days later. This was a spring break. And as I thought about that 50 south, the south is getting together. It’s right here in Cleveland, where we have work together. I don’t have to leave home, in that sense, to get involved, you know. So, you know, these things are always more clear in retrospect than they are at the time. In fact, that really was a little coin. And again, I can abstract, obviously, you know, sort it out, make it all neat and tidy. But as I look back on it, and this is something I use since recognizing that we need to treat the symptoms of an illness while we’re trying to deal with the causes. Okay. So this kind of two-prong focus of activity I’ve tried to stick with ever since. So, anyway, treating the symptoms, I think it meant focusing on the well segregated classrooms and the consequences of that. That was a time when urban renewal was basically pushing blacks out of west central and into Hough. Hough had had three elementary schools. It eventually got up to ten, but he had some fairly, you know, well, large and not so large dwellings, some of those older houses, and they were being subdivided and rented out to as many people as could be squeezed into them. And often Black relocatees displaced from what we used to call negro removal, which is kind of what, in a sense, we cleared a lot more land than we ever redeveloped, was kind of where the highway interchanges are now anyway.
Susan Kaeser [00:19:05] Was that largely because of highway construction?
Bruce Melville [00:19:07] Well, in west Central it was because you think, what do we have west of East 22nd? You just have road interchanges, right? There’s nobody living there anymore. And in fact, I think Frank Jackson, his family may have grown up in that area. And why he was so super sensitive when he was councilman of Ward Five to anything that suggested getting rid of housing as a whole other issue. Background. The white northern counterpart of Smith was a northern student movement. Yeah, that- Well, that was, you know, largely in the Ivy League schools. This is sort of a kind of a noblesse oblige kind of thing there. And we were hearing about, you know, people like Peter Stringmore(?), I think that was his name that sounded right. He was writing on this, and my people are my people. Anyway, so students at the Ivy League schools were doing things like tutoring in Harlem and North Philadelphia and two Cleveland area students who were home on spring break. By now we’re talking about the spring of ‘63, I think, Tom Vale, and one was at Brown, the other was at Smith. And they figure out who could they meet with who might possibly be interested in doing this kind of- Yeah, well, well, so they met with Bob Clark and this was in our students’ space at the basement of the church of the Covenant, and two students, Mindy McCreary and me. And so the six of us, you know, talk about them, they’re really pushing us, and we really ought to think about doing this kind of a thing. We really ought to have tutorial books. So what came out of that is that this quandary became, in effect, you know, kind of the faculty advisor, in a way, leading us. And I organized a pilot project the summer of ’63. We called it Cleveland Tutorial Project, CTP. And we got support from the assistant superintendent of Cleveland School and the principal of what was then Addison Junior High, it’s long gone, but it was at basically where Lexington Village was now, East 79th and Hough. And we set up five tutoring centers in Hough, and we appointed a center leader. I was the center leader at Fidelity Baptist, which was one of the ICPP churches. Paul Younger was the minister there. We’ll get back together him later. And Fidelity Baptist at East 84th and Wade Park, still there. So this was the beginning. Tom Bale State, I mean, kind of. Was kind of the leader of it. During that pilot project that summer. This was one on one tutoring involving a college of graduate student somewhere in the University of Circle area with an Addison junior high school, one on one. And the idea was those students didn’t have to leave their neighborhood to get help with what they needed help with. So, you know, pick up our two t’s, we call them. Can’t think of a better name than that. And mine came to Fidelity Baptist. And I don’t know if we met one or twice a week during the summer, but anyway, at the end of the summer, we. By that time, we had a steering committee, and we decided we got to make this a year round thing. It went so well, and I think it might have involved maybe a hundred pairs tutoring pairs, and it really did go very well. And so that then began a year round tutorial project. We even had black for the logo, CTP, that, you know, where these little buttons. And, of course, it didn’t say anything but CTP. And so, of course, people would ask the question, what’s CTP? Glad you asked. So, you know, this program grew over the next. At least this is still the early sixties. Probably aware the early sixties were very different from the late sixties. There was this whole shift at one point, I think we were tutoring as many as maybe 300 kids by that time. I think we were also tutoring some kids in Glenville. But it was still mostly focused in Hough anyway. So that was, in effect, treating the symptoms, but it was focusing on the what. What was failing to happen in Cleveland schools. And let’s see. So meanwhile, the other focusing on the causal stuff, the Cleveland chapter of CORE, Congress of Racial Equality. Jim Farmer’s organization was. I don’t know if it was starting or reinvigorating itself.
Susan Kaeser [00:24:56] I think it was starting. Okay, well, Bruce Connor was part of founding.
Bruce Melville [00:25:00] Well. Well, you know, I mean, history gets a little messy. Yeah, well, okay, tell me what you know about that history. So I remember. So, any rate, so we get back from this study trip, you know, in ’62 and he becomes active in what I see as a rejuvenation, or at least, you know, a Cleveland chapter of CORE. In an era when civil rights activity is cranking up, especially in the south, but not so much in the north. That wasn’t all that much happened. The chair of Cleveland CORE at that time was John Cloud. It’s not particularly significant. But there was also another teacher that was present. Her name was Ruth Turner, later Ruth Turner Perot. If you look at the acknowledgments in Jim Farmer’s autobiography, you’ll see that he acknowledges Ruth Antoni and Antoine Perot as persons who have something about sight into the black experience. Anyway, so he cites the two of them at this point is Ruth Turner, a teacher who had a master’s degree in German from. She was very articulate, and she became a chairperson, clearly, she was a leader. And one of our focuses. Well, we had a bride. And about any issue in this whole vicious circle of discrimination, certainly the schools were one. But another thing that was going on then is that a group of state representatives that they’re called, I think, at the state level, I’m not as familiar with state government as federal government, including state Rep. Carl Stokes, sponsored Fair housing bill. It was kind of stuck in committee. Now, this. This was, you know, at this point, There’s not yet any federal fair housing legislation. So discrimination in housing is still perfectly legal in practice virtually everywhere. And the result, of course, is these extreme degree of residential segregation on the basis of race. Anyway, so this bill isn’t getting anywhere.
Susan Kaeser [00:27:39] And so this is ’63.
Bruce Melville [00:27:42] This is ’63. Yes, this is ’63. This is late spring, maybe May, going into June, probably, of ’63. Now, there’s generally an awareness that it was Governor Rhodes and he hadn’t been in office all that long, that he was a pretty influential governor. And it was our opinion for those who were a lot more tuned in than I was, because I was still pretty naive in all of this, that he could probably prod through just about any legislation. Of course, you know, he was executive, legislative, but he was sitting on his hands on this. He wasn’t doing anything. And he. And, you know, there were sit ins in the south, you know, and all sorts of stuff was going on in the South. And I think at some point, he even said he welcomed sit-ins, you know, some. Some casual comment like that. Anyway, so. So the NAACP organized a- What is going to be a- Praying on the social. Some of us went down, and actually, I rode with John Cloud down to Columbus, and, you know, yeah, so we attempted to go into the floor of the, what would you call the assembly, the legislature, whatever it is. And of course, the sergeant at arms said, no, you can’t come in, you know. And so we tried kneeling down and praying, but it was pretty ineffective. At least now, you know, there’s this whole spectrum. There was pretty much falling apart. There was this whole spectrum of civil rights moves. And it was. That, I think, is a relevant strategy. You had the relatively conservative Urban League. We had the NAACP, which was historic, pretty much, you know, comprised of members of Black churches and Black clergy. And then you had CORE. More militants had that reputation, and these other organizations going down to maybe Jimmy Russell’s freedom fighters, you know, and people like Louis Robinson. Anyway, you know, so there’s this whole spectrum. And it was. It was useful because the conservative groups like, you know, Whitney Young, you know, at the Urban League, could go to the presidency wherever and say, look, no, if you don’t adopt the sensible things that we’re proposing, these people here are going to cause you a lot of trouble. You know, it was a very effective strategy. And of course, SNCC was more toward the radical end of that. Okay, I’m really-
Susan Kaeser [00:30:35] I’m really interested and want you to finish that. But I want you to get back to the school stuff because that’s really- [crosstalk]
Bruce Melville [00:30:42] Okay. That’s all right. Okay. But it all ties together and of course, it’s, you know, it’s all. It’s highly interrelated. So. So anyway, so that that particular attempt at protesting basically flopped. And so we retreat back to our, you know, wherever we are, and a group of CORE members get together in the basement of Alex Weather’s house in Hough. And it happened to be one night when there was- On either side of Superior, you’ve got Sowinski, was the Polish neighborhood on north of Superior, and Hough was south of Superior. And there was racial unrest across that divide. That particular night we met in the basement there. But anyway, the CORE couldn’t- Chapter CORE sort of outlined a strategy. We were going to go and go back down there. We’re going to be a little more assertive. We had arranged to have a meeting with the governor in his office, and that was to be 2 o’clock on a Monday. And we were projecting that this was going to be Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, you know, however long it was going to take to try to get that bill out of community, out of committee, and focus on Rhodes as a person who could do that. So anyway, so we agreed that there was a group from Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, and maybe other places met in Rhodes’s inner office, and he kind of dismissed us. Well, you know, they’re the three arms of government. There’s the executive, the legislative. I’m executive, and they’re legislative. And so I don’t have anything to do with that, you know. But, you know, I’m not, you know, I’m just not prejudiced because W. O. Walker is in my director of industrial relations, [inaudible] a Republican, and he’ll take you off into another room and he’ll talk with you. And so, you know, Ruth Turner says, remember, we’re staying here. And so everybody else left but Ruth and me and Audrey Semmes. And we sort of alerted the media that we intended to stay in Rhodes’s inner office until that bill was on committee. This was like, I don’t know, about three or so on that afternoon. Working with the media is always critical and getting the maximum attention on what’s showing up. Here’s the context. Rhodes was about to leave, go to Washington. The governors were meeting with President Kennedy, who was about to go off to Europe. Now, Kennedy wanted the United States to look good in his meeting with European leaders, and Rhodes wanted Ohio to look good in his meeting with the president. And here his own office is with a sit-in at the very night that he’s about to go off to meet with the president. You know, so timing is critical. At any rate. So we did well.
Susan Kaeser [00:33:40] He had some leverage.
Bruce Melville [00:33:42] Yeah, I think it could have been. Yeah. So try to fast forward this. Well, Audrey wasn’t able to stay the entire night, but Ruth and I did. And by about, I don’t know, 8 or 9 o’clock the following morning, our bladders were kind of at our limits here. You know, we basically ended the sit-in. But, of course, again issuing a public statement, which others were, you know, directing. And the following night, it escalated further. But nobody was gonna be let into the inner office after that. And Bruce Klunder was part of that second, planned second wave. And then there was a wave of sit-ins. Anyway, the outcome of is that the bill still was stuck in committee. There was a 10–10 vote with one abstention or something like that. So it did not get out of committee. But there was a lot of attention in the press and even the editorial cartoon in the Cleveland Press that- My parents found out what I was up to that day when they tuned on the evening news and [inaudible]. So I was- Thursday we went back home, and that was choir hope. So another kind of part of my education here. I had. I had been encouraged by a couple of friends, probably a year or two, probably a year before that, to come over to this church on the edge of University Circle that had this wonderful choir. This is Mount Zion Congregational Church, historically Black church. It formed the year of the Emancipation Proclamation. 108th and Magnolia. Anyway, so I showed up.
Susan Kaeser [00:35:24] My son sings there.
Bruce Melville [00:35:26] No kidding! Really? Well, I showed up and this was, you know, this was when their chancel choir then was really- I’d never sung in a choir before, so there was a kind of a, you know, ostensible sort of audition. Well, Mrs. Andrews, wonderful, wonderful person. So she invited me to join the choir. So there were a few white faces and there were actually more white faces in the choir than they were in the rest of the conversation on Sunday morning. So anyway, so I was part of the chancel choir and it was just, you know, it was just a wonderful, wonderful experience for me, coming out of my all-white world, you know, it was a mostly middle-class congregation. Anyway, so I get back in town Thursday evening and it’s choir rehearsal evening. So I was late for choir rehearsal, but I showed up anyway, and as I walked in, they stopped singing. What they were saying, Mrs. Andrews led them to sing. Anyway, that was also a point at which personal terms, I decided that I was still living at home. And that just wasn’t. I was long overdue to get out on my own, to pay my own tuition because I wasn’t doing well in school, because I was doing all this other stuff instead. So that was a transition for me from student life to adult life. I became a part time student, full-time worker. Let me try to tie this up here. So that bill didn’t get out of committee that day, but it passed the following session. So Ohio got a fair housing bill, four years, I think, ahead of the federal bill.
Susan Kaeser [00:37:11] So it passed in ’64?
Bruce Melville [00:37:13] I think it did, yeah.
Susan Kaeser [00:37:14] Because the Heights Citizens for Human Rights lobbied very hard for that.
Bruce Melville [00:37:18] So, I mean, it wasn’t any one until speaking from my perspective. But clearly it takes, you know, all these multiple pressures, right? But it got publicity, you know, and it was- It was being ignored until that point, I think, you know. So the publicity I got, I think, was key. Well, we better- We better pass it this time. So the focus then kind of shifts to the schools. And of course, there was this whole spectrum that I talked about of civil rights groups by that time in Cleveland. Okay. And we managed to come together, despite our internal strategic differences or tactical differences, under this umbrella called the United Freedom Movement, or UFM. Okay. Yeah.
Susan Kaeser [00:38:19] I want you to talk about that.
Bruce Melville [00:38:21] Okay. So.
Susan Kaeser [00:38:23] And they took on the segregation.
Bruce Melville [00:38:25] They was- They were- They became the umbrella group.
Susan Kaeser [00:38:31] Any issue that stimulated that to happen, to crystallize that?
Bruce Melville [00:38:37] I don’t know, I don’t know. But kind of acknowledgement, I think, that we had to act together. We’d be kind of fragmented and torn apart if we didn’t. Paul Younger, the minister of Fidelity Baptist, became the head of UFM, and there were several white Protestant ministers were leadership there, Dave Zuverink, who was the minister at Glenville Presbyterian, probably Bruce Glendale, was very involved in that. But lots of people were involved from their own perspectives, and we focused- The issue became that Cleveland Board of Education, Ralph McAllister, I believe, chaired the board, and whether it’s absolutely fair to call him a segregationist or not, but that’s essentially the policy he was pursuing. Their policy was that they would build new schools if that’s what it took to. To keep from having to integrate existing schools that had surplus classroom space. There was lots of surplus classroom space in schools like Murray Hill school in Little Italy, but the policy was, no, we don’t want to do that. We will build schools to maintain segregated classrooms. And, of course, you know, separate and unequal. There’s all kinds of documentation as to how unequal education was, in Cleveland public schools.
Susan Kaeser [00:40:34] So was Hugh Calkins on the board at that point?
Bruce Melville [00:40:40] I remember being a small part of his election campaign. It seems to me that was ’64.
Susan Kaeser [00:40:49] Because he later, at the City Club, admitted the wrongness of their ways.
Bruce Melville [00:40:56] Ah. Well, I don’t know if he was on then, but at least he ran for election or re-election, I believe, in ’64, ’65, somewhere in there. So we’re focusing on the board of education and a couple things going on. There were, I’ve got a couple, two or three UFM position papers. Okay? They used, as an example, the Orange school system, which had a single campus, but of course different situation, a single campus where all the students from Pepper Pike, Orange, Moreland Hills and Woodmere, which is pretty much where all the Blacks and school district lived. You know, we’re going to one set of schools on a single campus. Anyway, so they, UFM and Dave Cohen. Dave Cohen is there. Remember him? He was professor of intellectual history at Case, and he was very involved. And incidentally, it was faculty members like that who were contributing maybe $30 or so, and it was worth a lot more back then, to CTP, to, you know, we had practically no expenses, but we got some expense, you know? We had a very small budget, but. But it was faculty members really their contributions that was comprising the budget of CTP. But people like Dave Cohen, and I think he-
Susan Kaeser [00:42:33] Is it Cohn or Cohen?
Bruce Melville [00:42:35] Cohen.
Susan Kaeser [00:42:35] Okay.
Bruce Melville [00:42:36] Cohen. And that’s somebody else oh, Dave H?He’s somebody else. Yeah, I’ll get to him later. Dave Cohn. No, this is Dave Cohen. He later went off to a job in Washington. But anyway, he was one of the more sort of intellectuals, you know, that was involved in UFM and writing these position papers.
Susan Kaeser [00:43:02] Okay, so it attracted that crowd as well.
Bruce Melville [00:43:04] Yes, yes. We had that whole spectrum there, and we were focusing on the board of education, and we were picketing. This is probably like maybe January by now of ’64. Okay. And I remember my personal involvement. I was working at Regional Planning Commission in the old Arcade, so I get maybe a half an hour for lunch. And so in the middle of winter, what I could do is I could run around to East 6th street at the Royal Castle there, and I could get a couple of hamburgers. East Sixth at Short Vincent. Right? Stuff one in my pocket and eat the other one on the way to the board of education building. And I get there and take out my picket sign and pick it around there. And, you know, there would be Sergeant Unvery, the head of this subversive squad, sitting in his unmarked Plymouth at the curb with his Minox camera, taking pictures of all us subversives out there, you know, picketing in the board of education. When my time was up, I handed my sign and pulled my cold hamburger out of my pocket and eat that on the way back to the office- [inaudible].
Susan Kaeser [00:44:17] So who showed up for that kind of demonstration?
Bruce Melville [00:44:20] Well, Bruce Klunder would almost certainly be there. By that time-
Susan Kaeser [00:44:24] So this was the whole participants in all the UFM organizations?
Bruce Melville [00:44:28] It was UFM, yeah. CORE was always- The CORE members - people who came from that grounding, you know - were always a significant part of what was going on in UFM that, you know, we included. We included a lot of Black churches. That was kind of the NAACP perspective. Typically, most of those ministers were kind of more conservative than we were, coming from a different perspective. But they’d get their members involved, you know, they might not be there. So there was- So this raised public awareness. There had been many attempts to negotiate with the board of education to stop construction of these otherwise unneeded schools. We were getting nowhere with it. It just wasn’t going anywhere. We, at one point, which is probably February of ’64, we did a sit-in, in the board of education overnight. I was a Friday night. I did spend the night on those cold marble floors, and they were certainly hard. I had to leave for a wedding that I had to be in on Saturday. So I left just before the police started dragging the protestors out in the media, and they were they were, they were, they were not, you know, they were pretty rough on those protesters and that, that got caught by the tv cameras. So that kind of kept escalating up to, you know, early April when, you know, they were constructing the, or beginning construction the school on Lakeview on the edge of Glenville. Again, totally unnecessary except to preserve segregated schools.
Susan Kaeser [00:46:33] I think they put up three schools in Glenville at that time.
Bruce Melville [00:46:38] Oh. So, you know, pretty well, this is pretty well documented. By that time, I was, I was, oh, just as kind of background, I had, you know, transitioned to being sort of a self-supporting adult in August of ’63 at Regional Planning. And I thought, well, they’re in a liberal organization. They’ll certainly give me some time off to attend the march in Washington. Well, no, they wouldn’t. So I wasn’t able to attend that march in Washington. That’s another bit of history. And- Nor was I able to be at that school site that day because I had to be at work. But facts there are pretty well laid out.
Susan Kaeser [00:47:18] One of the things, things that interests me very much is that many of the suburbanites who were supportive of civil rights joined forces in this education thing, and they were at those demonstrations. So are you aware of that at all?
Bruce Melville [00:47:36] Well, you know, I just know that there were others there. I didn’t pay that much attention to who was there because I was never one of the leaders of that. I was just another one of the foot soldiers. The only time I had any problems at all was that sitting in the governor’s office. Other than that, I was just one more person on the line there.
Susan Kaeser [00:48:00] So I know Ned Edwards, who was the minister at Forest Hill Church, was there that day. This was a formative experience for so many people.
Bruce Melville [00:48:11] It was, yes.
Susan Kaeser [00:48:13] And that was, I think, maybe the first chance people had to really engage physically, put themselves on the line and for civil rights. Am I wrong?
Bruce Melville [00:48:24] Well, I think it was, things were certainly escalating. So, you know, it was certainly a high profile thing. I don’t remember there had been a protest in Little Italy regarding the Murray Hill School. And I think- Was that before? I think it was before, I would imagine. But it was ready. That’s right. I think it was leading up to that, I wasn’t there either because I had to work. But, yeah, so things were escalating, and the negotiations with the board, with Ralph McAllister were getting nowhere. So we’re just, you know, kind of butting heads on us. They weren’t giving, and we were trying to get, raise the public awareness of that. There wasn’t any that these needn’t be built. These needn’t be built except to preserve segregated classrooms.
Susan Kaeser [00:49:17] Was the media interested? Did you get their attention? Was their coverage?
Bruce Melville [00:49:21] I think we got some attention. Some attention. There was a tendency to trivialize it. You know? Certainly the way it got talked about in the daily papers wasn’t the way, for example, that it got interpreted by student leaders after Bruce’s death. And I’ve got documentation on that. I was- I ushered at his memorial service at Church of the Covenant. By that time, the president of SCU was Mike Barndt, B-A-R-N-D-T, who had been my roommate for a year. That first year that I was on my own, he incidentally, went on to sociology at University of Wisconsin. He was going to be an engineer. So there were going to be engineers that went off another direction. Yeah, we need engineers, too. But, you know, but there was this calling. It really was a calling. It’s an insight. Much the same time, there was one of these, you know, normal end of semester meetings with your faculty advisor. In the course of my undergraduate, I had nine different faculty advisors. None of them knew. Whoops, that’s Hardwood. None of them actually knew me. But at this one particular point, I was at that point a business student, business major at Western Reserve. That basically flunked out of Case. I mean, kind of a technicality, but nevertheless. So this is the dean of the business school, and so he pulls out my files. This is all he knows about me. He looks at my transcript and, you know, I’m taking a bunch of business courses and urban sociology as my elect, and I’m acing urban sociology, and I’m doing abysmally in all the business courses. And he looks at me and he gets a very scornful look and shake. What do you want to be? An urban sociologist. Maybe he’s got something. Anyway, all this is going on at the same time. So anyway, this will show you. Well, of course, it was the memorial service and Eugene Carson Blake giving the. The address. He was then. He was the head of the commission on religion and race of the National Council of Churches. So he was. I think he was on the cover of Time at least once during that period. He was a fairly high profile guy among, you know, clergy who were active in civil rights.
Susan Kaeser [00:52:25] Yeah.
Bruce Melville [00:52:26] So he gave the address there, and I recall we sang “Once to Every Man and Nation Comes the Moment to Decide.”
Susan Kaeser [00:52:36] So the religious world was very significant.
Bruce Melville [00:52:40] It was, [crosstalk] I think, much more so than now. Yes. Mainline Protestantism in particular, and the Jewish Congregations. Remember Rabbi Lelyveld? I mean, the pictures of him bloody, you know, in the South. Right? And, you know, and I think this is from my perspective now, you know, Reverend James Reeb, you know, in the South, you know, Unitarian Viola Liuzzo, housewife from Detroit, you know, in the South and go to register, you know, there were these church involvements back then, religious involved. I don’t think we see the same way.
Susan Kaeser [00:53:20] No, they were very powerful because it did get defined as a moral issue.
Bruce Melville [00:53:27] It did.
Susan Kaeser [00:53:27] And when it gets defined, when it got defined that way.
Bruce Melville [00:53:30] Yes, that’s right. Yeah.
Susan Kaeser [00:53:36] Do you have any sense of when that happened in your own mind or had it always been a more issue for you?
Bruce Melville [00:53:43] Well, not always. Not always. No. I think that, you know, I was probably roughly around age 20, really, when I started to think for myself.
Susan Kaeser [00:53:55] Yeah.
Bruce Melville [00:53:55] You know, I was so much under my parents’ influence, you know, really into my years at Case, my first couple years of college. But it was, SCU really was my liberal education in the midst of all those other courses and an occasional elective and sociology and racial and cultural minorities, you know, and that being coupled with what I was getting involved with, tutorial, project with CORE.
Susan Kaeser [00:54:22] You know, what’s interesting to me is that tutoring was a radical activity or radicalizing.
Bruce Melville [00:54:30] Well, yes, and, you know, it was. It really, I think that the tutors got at least as much out of that. You know, here we were breaking that barrier, that campus community barrier. We were leaving, you know, University Circle, and we were going into Hough, you know, we were meeting one on one with kids that could use our- And this is still the early sixties, and black and white together was still- Okay? That was- That was a critical. Radically, basically with the advent of, you know, before ’68. Well, yes, but meanwhile. Right. Meanwhile, you know, Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton co-authored the book Black Power, you know, and that was- And actually, well, I was actually a delegate from the Cleveland CORE chapter to the National CORE convention in Dayton in ’63, probably after. And I think that’s where Ruth, I think, introduced me to Jim Farmer [James Farmer]. No, actually, he came to Cleveland, and he was actually at the old Art’s Seafood on Cedar. And I think that’s where Ruth introduced me to [inaudible]. But. But what I really still- I was still too naive to really understand what was going on behind the scenes. And already at that point, I learned in retrospect, and I encourage, read his autobiography, what, Lay Bare the Heart, I think is what he called it, that already he was, he, Jim Farmer, that there was a restlessness in the civil rights movement and in the black community in general, I think that nonviolence wasn’t cutting it, that we were growing impatient. And so it was at that point, so in 63, that Floyd McKissick was elected. I think he become executive at CORE, and then Jim Farmer, I think, was Chair. That was already a transition, and John Lewis was a little bit too much pacifist and others.
Susan Kaeser [00:56:59] Seriously?
Bruce Melville [00:57:01] Yeah, and others that were not so committed to nonviolence started to take over the leadership of civil rights groups. So all that was happening, you know, really as early as 63, 64.
Susan Kaeser [00:57:17] Did you read his John Lewis’s memoir?
Bruce Melville [00:57:19] I did. I’ve got it. I’ve got it.
Susan Kaeser [00:57:21] It’s really worthwhile.
Bruce Melville [00:57:23] It really is.
Susan Kaeser [00:57:24] Hearing it through his voice makes all those points in history have so much more depth.
Bruce Melville [00:57:30] Yes, and his background is so different from, say, Jim Farmer’s, for example.
Susan Kaeser [00:57:39] Was he a northerner?
Bruce Melville [00:57:41] No, he grew up in Texas, but his father, I think, college professor, he grew up in middle-class circumstances. Yeah, but John Lewis absolutely was. That’s right. Yeah. But a side story there, I think part of the. Part of this is probably under appreciated in a larger context of civil rights is the role. You heard of the Highlander?
Susan Kaeser [00:58:15] Yeah.
Bruce Melville [00:58:16] Okay. The Highlander center [Highlander Folk School] in Tennessee. That was a critic- That was, that place, that retreat kind of like, was critical as a, I don’t want to call it breeding ground, you know, but as a place where the lessons, the philosophy of nonviolent protest were taught. And James Lawson. James Lawson. There’s another under appreciated person. As far as I know, he’s still alive, last I heard.
Susan Kaeser [00:58:50] I’ve been to his church.
Bruce Melville [00:58:55] Really? I knew somebody that was in his congregation. But isn’t he under appreciated? He was, I think, the one he taught them.
Susan Kaeser [00:59:04] Alright.
Bruce Melville [00:59:05] He was the one who went to India. Right. He was the one who brought back that back and was at the Highlander teaching. Yes. Pete Seeger was also there. You know, and there’s the story about how we shall overcome, evolved into what we know it as. But, yeah, much of that happened at the Highland. And then there’s Emma Baker, I think is another name.
Susan Kaeser [00:59:23] Ella Baker. I just read her.
Bruce Melville [00:59:25] Ella. Ella. Okay. Ella Baker.
Susan Kaeser [00:59:26] She named my dog Ella Baker.
Bruce Melville [00:59:27] Oh, okay. Well, there’s another person who I think is under appreciated. You know, I don’t know. This is kind of a sighting for me. We oversimplify our retelling of history and, you know, on Martin Luther King Day and we focus on him. You know, and he is worthy of a focus. But we shouldn’t forget all the other people like the Reverend James Lawson and, you know, the Ella Bakers and all, you know, all those other. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Memorial in Montgomery.
Susan Kaeser [00:59:59] I’ve been there. And Chris Conger’s name is there.
Bruce Melville [01:00:01] Yes, I know. Right. And he’s. He is the only one who was killed in North. All the rest, you know, it was probably accident. Nevertheless, in my mind, the importance isn’t the circumstances of his death. It’s his three year ministry, you know, that I experienced. And unfortunately, there aren’t too many people left who knew it. And he really was. He was my mentor. He really was.
Susan Kaeser [01:00:36] I was hoping you would talk about him.
Bruce Melville [01:00:37] He really was. Yeah.
Susan Kaeser [01:00:42] What made him so convincing to you or affected?
Bruce Melville [01:00:46] Well, he, first of all, he had a dedication that it was- Yes, he had a good sense of humor. For example, he was also my barber, $2, a haircut. And, you know, sometimes cut my hair and say, oops, ha ha ha. But we’d be planning meetings while he was cutting my hair. He wasn’t earning all that much money. And he had, you know, he and Joanne had two children, for example. Now, even though conservatives like to think that anybody involved in civil rights was probably communist, we got that label a lot. The reality is a lot more complex than that. The communist party wasn’t all that involved then. You know, there’s SWP and SLP and some others as well. And it was the Socialist Workers Party that was more active in Cleveland. I mean, yeah, Sydney Stapleton was the perennial candidate for president or whatever. That’s another story. But SWP had certain strengths. Cleveland area. And I don’t know that much about the Smith act, but it’s ambit. But Eric Reinthall, I was only putting up. And he was actually imprisoned. He was convicted of Smith act of, I don’t know, something.
Susan Kaeser [01:02:29] Is that a conspiracy?
Bruce Melville [01:02:30] Something like that. Something like that. Yeah. It was probably one of those McCarthy era things that got passed anyway. But I, you know, I knew him and his wife then was known as Judy. Maybe she was one of his civil. They invited me over. They lived on Ansel Road. And this was an area that was kind of known as Hough Heights. And lots of faculty lived right in there anyway. But he was SWP and one CORE chapter election, there were basically two sets, two slates of candidates. And I remember Bruce taking the essay because I was still pretty naive and saying, look, here’s what’s going on here. This is the CORE slate of candidates, Eric, and these others, really, that’s SWP, and you really ought to stay clear of that, even though they were obviously trying to, you know, make friends with me. So anyway, he would do that. He would do that sort of thing. And that was very helpful to me because I said he was only about three years older than I was, but he was a lot wiser, you know, and a lot more committed, too. So maybe the fact that he wasn’t that much older was relevant, but he really was. He really was dedicated, and he had this sense that he was.
Susan Kaeser [01:04:13] He engaged at the national level. And was the influence of what was going on in the Presbyterian church affecting his knowledge and understanding, or was his leadership really coming out of being. Being in Cleveland at that moment?
Bruce Melville [01:04:28] Well, my perception was that it was being in Cleveland, and this is where, you know, this is where he was. I remember I was. I was on the CORE nominating committee. It was probably. It was probably also the summer ’63. Somebody was a really critical time. And there was a. There was a sentiment that committee, including Ruth Turner, that he ought to be elected president. I and others thought that there really ought to be a black chairperson, you know, and so that’s happened. And Art Evans was elected. He was actually, he was. He was a bus driver, and he really, frankly, wasn’t quite up to the job. Had to be sort of coached a lot. Don’t do that, do this or say this. But Bruce was nominated as there were two vice presidents. He was one of the vice presidents of the. So he was vacationing back in his family in Oregon, I think, that summer. And I called him and asked if he would accept the nomination to that position, you know, but this was very much Cleveland CORE. I know that we were connected, actually. I think it was Dick Olbermann told me this, that even though William Sloan Coffin was chaplain of lit. at Yale at that time, he said no. He said the divinity school students wouldn’t have had that much contact with the college. Another example of his being there with there was, back in those days, I had no idea if it still exists. First of all, the SCU was basically a YMYW sponsored group, and they were active in a way then that they just aren’t anymore.
Susan Kaeser [01:06:25] Yeah.
Bruce Melville [01:06:25] And in fact, then the YM was still relevant. Yeah. Just became totally. The YW did not. The one imperative of the YW, remember that eliminating racism, by whatever means, that was the. Well, YW back in my later, later days of involvement in fair housing, institutionalizing it, that was. The YW was always important. The YM was by that time was irrelevant. That was the swinging gym crowd.
Susan Kaeser [01:06:52] That was the case in Cleveland Heights.
Bruce Melville [01:06:55] Anyway, so every four years, there was this big student assembly, I think was called the Athens quadrennial, because it had happened in Athens, Ohio, once that particular year. And I think it was. It was probably Christmas recess of probably. I don’t know if it’s ’62, 60- Probably ’62, ’63, doesn’t matter. Anyway, that particular time, it was happening at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. And so Bruce led a carload of us to that assembly of what was probably a thousand students. This was sort of what the times were like.
Susan Kaeser [01:07:44] Yeah, exactly.
Bruce Melville [01:07:46] This was about, you know, a thousand students, and quite a few of them were international students, which was pretty unusual back then, you know.
Susan Kaeser [01:07:54] And so this was the National assembly of what?
Bruce Melville [01:07:58] National Student Assembly. YMYW. Okay. So it was national student assembly that was really sponsored by YMCA, you know, campus level.
Susan Kaeser [01:08:08] Yeah.
Bruce Melville [01:08:10] The chaplain of that. That assembly was William Coffin. So he was there. And the theme of it was revolution and response. Again, tenor of the times. There were various workshops, and this is where housing things would be. The workshop that I tuned into is the name Morris Milgram. Okay. All right. So he was then developing, meaning building new communities in what, Princeton and other places, New Jersey in that area, intentionally integrated from the start. And that was a radical thing back then. And incidentally, his sort of his second working with him at that time was Stu Wallace. Again, other tangential things here. So about that. You know, about the time when we had Ohio fair housing law, but not federal law yet, some people locally formed a real estate firm called Fair Housing Inc. And hired Stu Wallace, from what, you know, from the east coast, come in and head that up as a realtor, sort of fostering non traditional moves, basically encouraging Black moves to White neighborhoods and White moves to integrated neighborhoods.
Susan Kaeser [01:09:40] Before you go off on that, yes. I want to go back to something you said, which is it was still, okay, Black and White together.
Bruce Melville [01:09:47] Yes.
Susan Kaeser [01:09:48] So that was the time when the leadership and involvement was the pre-Black Power part.
Bruce Melville [01:09:53] Yes.
Susan Kaeser [01:09:54] But it was also unusual for Black and White people to be together.
Bruce Melville [01:09:58] You’re right. It Was
Susan Kaeser [01:10:00] So you talk about both of those.
Bruce Melville [01:10:02] Things a little bit for the culture in general. We were in very separate worlds, but there was at least, you know, an increasing number of Whites, I think, who recognized, you know, the moral bankruptcy of segregation, even though the federal government really, you know, still was- This was still official policy. HUD hadn’t come into being yet, but it was what HHFA And it’s all this stuff about, you know, even FHA or HHFA. Any rate, their policy was segregation was right to discourage any element that would somehow be contrary to the. Whatever the proper term is of a neighborhood. And so these exclusionary zoning things really kind of backed up by the federal government, which is policy up and down, up and down the line. But again, and I think from a moral perspective, I think there were more and more people that were recognizing that this is wrong. And so there was a movement that I think was forming all the organizations, you know, about, some of them in the heights area, elsewhere and across the country. And students wasn’t just the sit ins, you know, it wasn’t Northern Student Assembly or whatever, NSA was. So. Yeah, yeah.
Susan Kaeser [01:11:50] And I guess the other thought is one of the people that I spoke with, an African American woman, was saying that her parents moved to the Heights because they decided being part of integration was important.
Bruce Melville [01:12:02] When was that?
Susan Kaeser [01:12:04] In the mid sixties?
Bruce Melville [01:12:06] Mid sixties?
Susan Kaeser [01:12:06] Mid to late sixties. And I wondered if CORE, because it was an integrated group, part of that message was finding those Black people who were willing to be pioneers-
Bruce Melville [01:12:18] Were willing to be pioneers.
Susan Kaeser [01:12:21] Who were willing to participate in the integration process, who would embrace that as desirable or as something that they were willing to take some risks on.
Bruce Melville [01:12:29] An insight in that. So I’m in the chancel choir at Mount Zion, and it’s quite middle-class, and it included some, you know, some principals, school principals, George and Bessie Grant in particular. George was, I think, maybe a principal, but at least a teacher. And they had a son, Owen, I think was his name. You probably aware that skin tone is still very relevant in the Black community. I remember, for example, at Mount Sinai, the custodian, Harold Jenkins, lived sort of upstairs in that house that’s was kind of built onto. And I spent enough time around. I was kind of part of the inner family there. And this was probably like mid ’60s, ’63, something like that. I remember him telling me he was. He was kind of light skinned. He was an alcoholic, and he just basically was kind of a failure. You know, he had a very pretty young daughter who was very light skinned. And he told me that if she ever brought home a dark skinned boyfriend, if he would kick her out of the house, that’s how strong all that was back then.
Susan Kaeser [01:14:02] Identifying with the oppressor, in other words. [laughs]
Bruce Melville [01:14:05] Right. You know, those. You know, all the Clark. You know, his studies were into that. Yes.
Susan Kaeser [01:14:16] Well, because one of the very interesting things that happened in the Cleveland Heights side of it is when Heights Citizens for Human Rights set out to integrate through the heights, they had to partner with someone to find Black home buyers who would be willing to be part of it. And Mount Zion was one of their partners.
Bruce Melville [01:14:35] That makes sense. That makes sense.
Susan Kaeser [01:14:36] And they had a let’s go shopping weekend in 1967 where Cleveland Heights activists partnered with members of that church and took them to Cleveland Heights to look at houses.
Bruce Melville [01:14:47] Yeah, that’s what it took. That’s what it took to try to break down- You really were being a pioneer.
Susan Kaeser [01:14:54] Yeah.
Bruce Melville [01:14:55] So I was picking one of my electives. I don’t know which one it was. Anyway, I needed to interview somebody, you know. So George Grant agreed to be interviewed. He was living in Glenville then. You know, basically that a lot of Mount Zion members lived in Glenville then. It was more middle-class because, I mean, they were one step behind the Jewish migration. I think I still got notes from that somewhere. And I think I asked him at one point if he would be willing to pioneer.
Susan Kaeser [01:15:32] First of all, at that point, you called it pioneer.
Bruce Melville [01:15:35] Well, he did, and I guess I did. See, so his young son, he was probably a preschooler at that point, did not know what it meant to be Black. And he said, at that point, in all neighborhoods, transition at that point, that was Glenville was undergoing economic transition. It was no longer some middle-class, and there were some tougher elements moving into the neighborhood and being investigated. We’re kind of thinking it was time to move on. And it was a question of move on to where? Because there weren’t that many alternatives. I mean, think about what I researched later when I really got into demographics, is that the Lee-Harvard Miles area within Cleveland was pretty much the highest, one of the highest income areas in Cleveland, because, you know, middle-class Blacks. That’s right. They were still- They were still confined to the city. If they had been White, they would have probably been in Maple Heights or somewhere else. That was them. That was them. So we talked about that. And, you know, certainly George felt that Owen somehow needed to develop an awareness of what it meant to be light skinned or whatever. He wasn’t. But George was reluctant to be too much of a pioneer. They did move to Ludlow after that. It was a little bit later, but, you know, he showed that somewhere. I’ve got that written up probably still. So that was the perspective of a Black middle class family living in Glenville at that time and figuring out as the neighborhood was getting tougher, where were they going to go? What choices did they have? Ludlow was really, really an exception back then.
Susan Kaeser [01:17:43] Sure.
Bruce Melville [01:17:44] No, I- Go ahead.
Susan Kaeser [01:17:45] I feel like we’re running out of time, but we need to do this more.
Bruce Melville [01:17:50] Yeah, there’s obviously a lot more to it.
Susan Kaeser [01:17:52] Yeah.
Bruce Melville [01:17:52] We’re still in the early sixties, but-
Susan Kaeser [01:17:55] Just to close down.
Bruce Melville [01:17:57] Yeah.
Susan Kaeser [01:17:57] In your- So here you are. This White boy comes out of a White neighborhood, gets some education in social responsibility.
Bruce Melville [01:18:06] Yeah, but-
Susan Kaeser [01:18:08] So what was your comfort level in navigating through these organizations with Black people? There was a welcoming sense because you were in the same conflict.
Bruce Melville [01:18:17] Mount Zion was so welcoming. It really was. I was just really accepted there. You know, I kind of felt as if they maybe were bending over backwards sometimes. They wanted to make me president of the choir. I said, no, no, I don’t think I should do that.
Susan Kaeser [01:18:29] So the church connections were really the place where it happened.
Bruce Melville [01:18:32] Well, for me, you know, for me, too, for my sort of formative relationships with Blacks. To be middle-class, you know, to be middle-class, that eased my transition, that, you know, eased my opening up again, my breaking down my middle-class White isolation, you know, transition to middle-class Black. And those Sunday services were really- They were not the typical Black church. You know, Reverend Andrews was very sophisticated. And I think back then, it’s probably changed since back then. Had anyone in the congregation uttered an Amen response, they would have been mortified. You know, it was- You know.
Susan Kaeser [01:19:19] They were Congregationists! [laughs]
Bruce Melville [01:19:22] Yeah. They were trying so hard to be in the middle class. Some years, some years later, Harold Gaines taught at Tri-C or something like that, and he was one of those early Blacks moving into the Rozelle area of East Cleveland. Actually, I think this is one of- This is one of those people that we probably interviewed. During those formative years, he already lived in East Cleveland then, and he was, I think by his own calculation, he’s like one-sixteenth Black, something like that. So light complexion. And he was out there mowing his lawn. And a blockbuster came along. You know about blockbusters, the way it was done. And this blockbuster gave the usual pitch, they’re coming. They’re coming. Maybe you better sell now because they’re coming. And all the consequences. And didn’t even have to say what the consequences because everybody knew what the consequences- So Harold just sort of leaned on his lawnmower for a while and let him go through his bit. Man, we are already put in context. But in a sense, the larger challenge was after you got the laws, which we were fighting so hard to get institutionalizing behavior, compliance with the laws. That was a long process. That was the seventies. And I was very much involved in that. And that’s a whole other story.
Susan Kaeser [01:20:57] Why don’t we make that the next story?
Bruce Melville [01:20:59] Okay. Alright.
Susan Kaeser [01:20:59] Because that’s exactly it.
Bruce Melville [01:21:01] It is. Right. It’s a whole other story, and there’s a whole other cast of characters for that.
Susan Kaeser [01:21:06] And in my Cleveland Heights story, it’s two stories. It’s the pre-law volunteer moral force that opened the community, and then there was all the effort based on human rights to test the law and make it. Did you have any questions before we go? [crosstalk] Because she’s been thinking and thinking and listening.
Unknown Speaker [01:21:26] I just had one. I know you joined Mount Zion in the sixties.
Bruce Melville [01:21:31] Yeah.
Unknown Speaker [01:21:31] But do you have any, any information about the bombings that occurred in the fifties when Mount Zion moved to the mansion on 106?
Bruce Melville [01:21:41] No, that was before I tuned in. [crosstalk] So really, I was really tuned out until I turned it.
Susan Kaeser [01:21:48] Got it.
Bruce Melville [01:21:50] I went through a real transformation that, you know, more obvious in retrospect, but, yeah, that’s- I mean, I had always been a very compliant kid, and it really wasn’t until I was, like about age 20 when I sort of came into my own. And my parents really didn’t know how to deal with it. They really didn’t. It was totally outside their experience. They were another generation.
Susan Kaeser [01:22:18] Right. I think, you know, all that work through the campus ministry stuff was really significant pioneering.
Bruce Melville [01:22:29] I think it was.
Susan Kaeser [01:22:30] And it really not brought them.
Bruce Melville [01:22:31] Not just for me.
Susan Kaeser [01:22:32] Yeah. For, I mean-
Bruce Melville [01:22:33] How many people got their introduction that way?
Susan Kaeser [01:22:35] Yeah. And how- What was the entry point? There were very few entry points into the struggle.
Bruce Melville [01:22:41] Right.
Susan Kaeser [01:22:41] And this was an entry point that it was very affecting to the people who participated and life transforming, you know, an innocent thing. Let’s go to the campus ministry basement and talk about the problems of the day. And that’s how people get changed.
Bruce Melville [01:23:02] Yes, that’s right. And there are lessons from that to be applied.
Susan Kaeser [01:23:09] And I think that Klunder incident, I mean, that absolutely galvanized the Cleveland Heights liberals to take action. So it’s- And who else was affected? I just know about them. But what else was affected because of that?
Bruce Melville [01:23:26] And, you know, and of course, that’s what I have, a sense of urgency, or we’re gone because, I mean, look, it’s now 50 years later, you know, and look who we no longer have with us.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
