“All I Want is Opportunity”: Doris Weaver, Wilhelmina Styles, and the Pursuit of a Professional Status

In the early 1930s, Jim Crow practices at Ohio State University prevented African American students Wilhelmina Styles and Doris Weaver from taking a mandatory course for their Home Economics major. The Home Management Laboratory class required a one-quarter residency at the Grace Graham Walker House, an all-white women’s dormitory. Admitting Styles and Weaver would have resulted in the integration of the residential hall, an act prohibited by the University’s policy against racial intermingling. My essay depicts the racialized and gendered social order maintained by Ohio State University in the early 1930s as well as the political and legal challenges launched by Styles, Weaver, and their supporters throughout the state to protest the school’s version of Jim Crow. The previously unstudied cases of Styles and Weaver offer three significant insights regarding race and gender relations, and two broader implications. First, the efforts to prevent Styles and Weaver from fulfilling their educational requirements expose how institutions in the North maintained separate and unequal practices without the legal underpinnings that existed in Southern states. Second, the opposition that Styles and Weaver faced illuminates how white women actively engaged in constructing racial barriers to prevent African American women from achieving what historian Alice Kessler-Harris has termed “economic citizenship.” Finally, the resistance efforts of Styles, Weaver, and their supporters reveal how black women defined citizenship during this Jim Crow era, how they came to imagine the role Home Economics training could play in their pursuit of that citizenship, and how black and white communities began to mobilize legally and politically in an effort to foster racial integration.

“All I Want is Opportunity”: Doris Weaver, Wilhelmina Styles, and the Pursuit of a Professional Status

In the early 1930s, Jim Crow practices at Ohio State University prevented African American students Wilhelmina Styles and Doris Weaver from taking a mandatory course for their Home Economics major. The Home Management Laboratory class required a one-quarter residency at the Grace Graham Walker House, an all-white women’s dormitory. Admitting Styles and Weaver would have resulted in the integration of the residential hall, an act prohibited by the University’s policy against racial intermingling. My essay depicts the racialized and gendered social order maintained by Ohio State University in the early 1930s as well as the political and legal challenges launched by Styles, Weaver, and their supporters throughout the state to protest the school’s version of Jim Crow. The previously unstudied cases of Styles and Weaver offer three significant insights regarding race and gender relations, and two broader implications. First, the efforts to prevent Styles and Weaver from fulfilling their educational requirements expose how institutions in the North maintained separate and unequal practices without the legal underpinnings that existed in Southern states. Second, the opposition that Styles and Weaver faced illuminates how white women actively engaged in constructing racial barriers to prevent African American women from achieving what historian Alice Kessler-Harris has termed “economic citizenship.” Finally, the resistance efforts of Styles, Weaver, and their supporters reveal how black women defined citizenship during this Jim Crow era, how they came to imagine the role Home Economics training could play in their pursuit of that citizenship, and how black and white communities began to mobilize legally and politically in an effort to foster racial integration.

Jim Crow in the big house: The benching of Willis Ward and the rise of segregation in the north

A significant portion of the literature exploring the history of Jim Crow in America has been geographically situated upon the South, where Jim Crow ostensibly had its most profound and pernicious presence. As a consequence, studies on the existence of Jim Crow in regions such as the North have been limited and, to some degree, have produced a widely-held assumption that the North was not only more racially tolerant than the South but also uncommitted to the practice known as Jim Crow. However, a recent examination of collegiate sports in America has yielded quite a different reading of Jim Crow’s presence in America, particularly in the North. The scrutiny of incidents involving black athletes at northern institutions has provided empirical evidence to buttress the certainty that the North, like the South, also engaged in or capitulated to the practice of discriminating against blacks. In many cases, black athletes at institutions like the University of Michigan, New York University, Ohio State University, and other northern universities countenanced racial segregation at its worst, often being withheld from sporting competitions or, in some cases, participation on various sporting teams. This thesis seeks to survey these experiences that black athletes countenanced at the northern universities in order to enlarge upon the larger idea that Jim Crow existed in the North. In addressing Jim Crow’s existence in the North, this thesis has relied upon a sampling of primary sources from the period as well as historical texts that have sought to address the subject. In conjunction with historical research, this thesis has drawn upon the scholarship of a vast number of individuals, most notably C. Vann Woodward, in both probing and proving the de facto practice of Jim Crow in the North

Ohio History 2014

https://kent-islandora.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/node/10128/OH-v121-thumb.jpgOHIO HISTORY Contents for Volume 121, 2014 Time Not Ripe: Black Women’s Quest for Citizenship and the Battle for Full Inclusion at Ohio State University Tyran Kai Steward ...... 4 “The Most Free of the Free States”: Politics, Slavery, Race, and Regional Identity in Early Ohio, 1790–1820 John Craig Hammond ...... 35 James A. Shedd to Dr. David Jordon: A Documentary Perspective on the Dayton Mob of 1841 Hans C. Rasmussen ...... 58 The Ohio Constitution of 1803, Jefferson’s Danbury Letter, and Religion in Education David Scott ...... 73 Memories of Work and the Definition of Community: The Making of Italian Americans in the Mahoning Valley Donna M. DeBlasio and Martha I. Pallante ...... 89 Germans, Jubilee Singers, and Axe Men: James A. Garfield and the Original Front-Porch Campaign for the Presidency Jeffrey Normand Bourdon ...... 112 &nbsp; Book Reviews ......&nbsp;130 On the cover: Niles Fire Brick workers, ca. 1896.</p