In rural Ohio, racial divide runs deep
Blacks in many communities say they still feel like second-class citizens
Sean Blair remembers a big culture shock when he moved from Whitehall to Pataskala in 2000 after he graduated eighth grade.
Every time Blair and a group of friends started a pick-up basketball game after school, a man would honk his Dukes of Hazzard-themed horn and flash a middle finger at the Black teenagers.
Other kids laughed at racist jokes made in front of him.
“You just had to deal with it,” Blair said.
Since the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police in May, there has been a national racial reckoning.
Huge crowds poured into urban areas to protest police brutality and racism. Many rural areas held protests and vigils as well. And discussions have begun in some rural towns in Ohio about ways to combat racism, such as when Newark revived its NAACP chapter this past summer.
Of the 1.6 million Black residents in Ohio, 3.7%, or nearly 52,000 live in non-metropolitan areas, according to a Rural Health Information Hub analysis of data complied by the U.S. Census’ 2018 American Community Survey. Those rural residents have unique challenges in small towns and villages where the populations are overwhelmingly white.
Some Black people who who grew up in rural areas say there is a fair amount of denial about racism in their communities, and they recounted their experiences with bias and hate.
Blair, who graduated from Licking Heights High School in 2004, saw some of the same classmates who mocked him in high school vilify the #Blacklivesmatter movement on Facebook.
“The people I went to school with were saying, ‘This has blown up, there’s no racism,’” Blair said. “Well, we don’t just make this up to say, ‘Hey, we want attention.’”
Roots in history
Janai Troutman, a senior at the Ohio State University Marion campus, was told that racism does not exist in Bucyrus, a small city in Crawford County, 64 miles north of Columbus.
But it didn’t stop people in her town – classmates, an ex-boyfriend, she said, from casually dropping racial slurs.
The 20-year-old endured microaggressions targeted at her sexuality, as the sole Black person in her grade at Wynford High School.
Sometimes she heard them say, “‘I don’t want to be with a Black girl. They’re too obnoxious, too opinionated.’”
Troutman’s experiences aren’t unique, said long-time Bucyrus resident Jeanette Walker, and they are not the beginning of the town’s relationship with racism.
Walker, 83, grew up in Crestline, a village 16 miles east of Bucyrus, in an African-american neighborhood segregated from white people. She bought a house in Bucyrus in 1971, moving herself and her children for a better job opportunity at the Timken Company.
The Walkers have endured racism for decades, the matriarch said. But Bucyrus was different. The Black community is nearly non-existent and the family interacted with far more white people than they did in Crestline.
There are only 19 African-americans living in Bucryus, compared with an estimated 173 living in Crestline, according to the U.S. Census’ 2018 American Community Survey.
One memory from those early years will always haunt Walker.
Soon after she moved to Bucyrus, she remembers being at the local grocery store, ready to check out. She was about to leave, but felt something wet on the back of her hand.
“I looked down and this little boy was licking the back of my hand,” Walker explained, “And then he turned to his mother and told his mother, ‘Mama, she’s not chocolate.’”
“It’s the parents,” she added, “that’s teaching the young ones how to be racist.”
Bucyrus held a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest in June, the local Tele
graph-forum reports. The town was just one of many rural cities that held protests during the summer, according to The Dispatch.
“I didn’t think much of it,” she said. “It was just for show. I don’t expect for nothing to change here in Bucyrus, not while I’m living.”
High school hallways
In the fall of 2013, Trae Williams, star running back on the Athens High School varsity football team with now-bengals quarterback Joe Burrow, was teetering on the edge.
The team faced Fairland, in Proctorville, one of the southernmost points of the state.
“I was spit on, stepped on and got called the n-word as much as I’ve ever been in my life,” Williams said. “I also got a couple of my touchdowns mysteriously taken off the board with penalties.”
He remembers just breaking down and crying.
Living in Athens was strange, Williams said.
Community members who were kind to him also touted the Confederate flag as a symbol of heritage.
“These people cheered me on at my games,” Williams said. “It’s basically the feeling of, y’all did not know me. If I wasn’t the record-breaking running back, I would be put in the same category as all these other Black people you don’t know.”
Williams’ experience – of watching white people make exceptions for his Blackness – is common in spaces with minimal exposure to diversity, Raven Lynch said.
“People usually learn prejudice and racist ideas from their parents or those around them, from media or TV,” the Ohio State graduate teaching assistant
and doctoral student said. “So they make exceptions for their Black friends or the one or two Black people in their community.“
Paedyn Gomes, 24, remembers when a squad car rolled up to the hill he was working out on, and an officer told Gomes someone who was nervous about a string of recent break-ins called the police on Gomes.
It was summer 2015, after his freshman year running track and field at Yale, and there had been several robberies around Chesterland, a small town east of Cleveland.
Before the officer arrived, Gomes noticed a guy in his car circle back to the hill several times before asking Gomes if he needed any help.
Sporting Yale track and field gear, he held up his workout packet. It didn’t assuage the man’s fears.
The athlete moved to Chesterland midway through high school and said he never felt like he belonged. His crowning achievement – being accepted into and signing with an Ivy League school for track and field – was dismissed by many of his white classmates.
“I never really felt all that comfortable being one of the handful of Black students,” Gomes said. “You always felt inherently looked down on by people.”
‘Second-class citizens’
Cathie Carlton, 72, remembers when her father, who worked odd jobs before securing a factory position, was paid in livestock or given tractors from white farmers instead of cash, after their family moved to Jefferson, in northeastern Ohio, in the 1950s.
Vanessa Burchett, Carlton’s younger sister, said their father was a proud man, and believes his employers took advantage of that pride when paying him in two chickens for a week’s worth of wages.
“As I’m reflecting, I’m wondering was that because they couldn’t do better?” Burchett said. “Or just feeling like, ‘Hey, you know, that’s all you’re gonna get,’ even though he got the work done.”
School was still segregated when Carlton first enrolled. Kids taunted her, called her the n-word and told her she was from a shanty.
One of Carlton’s most painful memories was when she was pulled from grade school along with her two older siblings and taken to a black sedan.
The doors were locked and the children were brought to children services. Carlton and her sister were separated from their brother.
“We weren’t old enough to say no,” Carlton said.
They were eventually released into their father’s custody. There was no explanation.
No matter how much progress has been made, she said, her soul still aches.
Sixty years later, does this moment after George Floyd’s death feel any different?
“To see the policeman put his knee in his neck and to see the crowd just sit there … It hurt my heart so bad, I sat up here and cried,” Carlton said. “They’re still holding us down, and they still say we have as much of an opportunity as white people, but that’s not true.”
Hope for the future?
Raven Lynch said incidents of racism in rural areas are distinct because many rural white communities are also oppressed.
Class and access to resources divide some white, rural Ohioans from wealthier white urban or suburban Ohioans, Lynch said. Rather than forging a common identity with marginalized groups, they compete to elevate their own status, she said.
Lynch’s dissertation is on multiracial adolescence and identity development. As a biracial woman who grew up in a village outside Coshocton, her personal experiences have informed her area of research.
White communities, Lynch said, “get mad at other people that are also struggling and then kind of pit themselves against each other. Thinking that if they can just be the least oppressed ... then they can potentially get to the top.”
Lynch, who also teaches a class called “Minority Perspectives in Social Work,” said studies show that a lot of rural, racist attitudes aren’t malicious, they’re just hard to unlearn.
“You can’t be what you can’t see,” Lynch said. “A community that doesn’t know what it’s missing is not going to change.”
Ceili Doyle is a Report for America corps member and covers rural issues in Ohio for The Dispatch. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation at: https://bit.ly/3fnsgaz. cdoyle@dispatch.com @cadoyle_18