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.
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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
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