Traveling Musicians and Segregated Stations: The Green Book, Railroad Edition

by Cj Jacobs

Please note that “’Round Howard Street” blog posts feature archival documents which may contain offensive content. Language and images presented in some historical documents may follow incorrect and harmful stereotypes based on race, sexuality, gender identity, ethnicity and/or culture. Please read and review this blog with care. For our full Statement on Offensive Content, click here. 

African Americans were often subject to segregation even after the Civil War and up to the Civil Rights Movement. Railroads were no exception to this, but not as discussed as other modes of transportation. Train Stations were also segregated in certain parts of the United States up until the Civil Rights Movement. While it’s not clear what practices were like at Akron’s Union Station, segregation would have had an impact on jazz musicians’ travels. Many of the trains that left here went to segregated places, and the stations might not have been as welcoming as Akron.

The segregated stations typically would have a “colored” waiting room which had their bathrooms and benches, while the rest of the station would have separate areas for bathrooms, telephones, and gendered waiting rooms. It, however, was more common to see segregation within the stations than the train cars as train tickets were sold on a class system rather than according to race.

Segregated waiting room at Union Station Railroad Depot in Jacksonville, Florida, State Library and Archives of Florida

Perhaps many jazz performers would be able to buy a higher-class ticket as they traveled between shows, rather than automatically being put into a segregated car on arrival. In Akron, the location of East Market Gardens to Akron’s Union Station could have allowed jazz musicians at the time to easily travel to Akron to play for the night. The rail lines themselves went from Akron to places like New York and Chicago, connecting “Little Harlem” to the rest of the large jazz cities.

Railroads had a strong hold on the Green Book guides, too. In 1951, the Green Book even had a “Railroad Edition” published to show how African Americans could get around without many issues compared to other methods of travel. That said, the edition offers mostly pictures of white railway passengers.

The Green Book, Railroad Edition. New York Public Library.

In the early 1900s, discussions of Jim Crow sections of train cars were written in the Akron Beacon Journal. In October of 1910, an article was published that discussed an African American justice, J. Alexander Chiles, and his effort to combat the “Jim Crow Car” he was forced to ride in during his trip from Washington to Lexington. The “Jim Crow Car” was often a train car combined with another use on the tracks as well, such as a luggage or smoking car. The car would be not as furnished or have not as many amenities as the other travelers would be provided during their ride.

Jim Crow Car used by the Southern Railway, The News and Observer

The topic of “Jim Crow Cars” first appeared in the Cleveland Call & Post around 1940 with reports of fights and law decisions on the cars themselves. An article that stuck out was published on May 9^th, 1942. Two Talladega students riding in the “Jim Crow” part of the train car were attacked after dimming the lights in their car so they could sleep, while other sections of the car were already dimmed. The coverage in the Call & Post continued into the early 1950s as articles came out regarding rulings on “Jim Crow Cars” and other modes of transportation. While segregation in history classes and books is often discussed, usually the topics only include segregation within schools, businesses, or busses, but other places were segregated as well. Many people relied on railroads to travel the United States, and jazz musicians may have used rail stations as choices for their concert venues which brought business and music for everyone to listen to. While trains today are not nearly as popular as they used to be for the average citizen, the next time you are at a railroad crossing, think of who could have ridden these rails you see before you, and think about what railroads did for cities such as Akron.

On Pejoratives and the Research Process

by Sophie Senning, Chloe DiMario, and Olivia Gruber

Please note that “’Round Howard Street” blog posts feature archival documents which may contain offensive content. Language and images presented in some historical documents may follow incorrect and harmful stereotypes based on race, sexuality, gender identity, ethnicity and/or culture. Please read and review this blog with care. For our full Statement on Offensive Content, click here. 

Language is an ever-changing part of our lives. It is different now than it was 100 years ago, 50 years ago, and even 10 years ago. One of these significant differences is offensive language often targeted at minority groups. Pejoration is a linguistic term used to describe when the meaning of a word garners a negative connotation over time. Slurs are some of the most common pejoratives discussed today, especially in fields of study dealing with social history.

Over the course of the last thirteen weeks, our class has been doing research on historic Howard Street in downtown Akron. For our research we have been looking at newspaper articles, personal testimonies, and various other historical resources to try and understand Black and LGBTQ+ life in the mid-1900s. Along with this, we have unfortunately come across instances of pejoration.

In 1936, the Torch Club ran an advertisement in The Akron Beacon Journal for an event tagged “The Torch Goes Gay.” It was followed by the phrase “Female Impersonators,” who we would now label as drag queens. There are still some people who define themselves this way today, but this term has been criticized as transphobic and offensive. However, this was an advertisement from the club themselves, showing how this term was originally more normalized. The shifting of identifying terms in the LGBTQ+ community is a consistent trend in history as can be seen with the debate over the term “queer.” However, it wasn’t just the LGBTQ+ community themselves who used these terms, but news outlets as well.

Akron Beacon Journal. February 26, 1936

As Sophie Senning explains, working with these terms can be jarring, but using them yields better search returns. She says, “During my research for this class, I came across numerous slurs being used in articles about the queer community. I quickly realized that I got much better results from my searches if I used slurs, as that’s just how people were referred to. As someone who is transgender, having to constantly read these slurs during my research definitely got to me at at first. Although to be honest, most of them are things I’ve already heard people in my community (or myself) be called, so I grew numb to it pretty quickly out of necessity. In most of these stories you can tell that the queer people are being written about, rather than writing about themselves. Even in articles taking a more professional tone, queer people are treated as an oddity, a spectacle, lowlifes, something you observe but don’t actually want to associate with. Rarely do they do the seemingly obvious of asking queer people questions, instead choosing to speculate. It serves as both a reminder of how far we’ve come, while at the same time reminding me of the number of news articles I see regularly today that make the same mistakes.”

Many of the words we use today to refer to the queer community are actually very new. For example, words like “transgender” didn’t actually start being commonly used until the 1990s, and the original meaning of the word has changed since then as well. Originally coined in the late 1960s by transgender woman Virginia Prince, she originally intended for transgender to only mean trans people who have not had a sex change operation, compared to the then called transsexuals. Nowadays, the word transgender has become a blanket term for anyone that does not identify with their gender assigned at birth. 

As we are looking at several decades during our research, knowing the right words to use has become a big part of finding useful information. For example, searching in the 1930s and 40s, words like “female impersonators”, “queer”, and “third sex” turn up more results. In later decades like the 1960s, the words “transvestite”, “gay”, and “homosexual” are more common. 

New Pittsburgh Courier. March 19, 1932.

Reading 1900s newspaper articles is enlightening into the negative attitudes LGBTQ+ individuals had to face and how they often were not in control of how they were portrayed. The language that was often used to describe them and their romantic lives is problematic today and is a clear product of a more ignorant time. As active learners of Akron history, we in the ‘Round Howard Street UnClass are responsible for reading and relaying the stories and attitudes of the past, despite the offensive nature of some. 

Sources

Gary Felsinger, A History of Akron Gay Life. 2009.

“Strange ‘Third’ Sex Flooding Nation, Writer Reveals.” New Pittsburgh Courier. March 19, 1932

“The Torch Goes Gay.” Akron Beacon Journal. February 26, 1936

The Lincoln Bar: A Lost History?

 By Olivia Gruber

Doing research is hard – this is a surprise to absolutely no one. Doing research on a topic that’s actively trying to hide itself? That’s nearly impossible. When I say “a topic that’s actively trying to hide itself” I mean a place or thing that didn’t particularly want to be known for fear of retribution, and in this instance in particular I mean queer history. 

For the better part of thirteen weeks now our class has been doing research on Howard Street. We’ve delved into the world of jazz as it was seen in Akron’s history and its impact on the historically Black community there. In turn, this led us to wanting to delve deeper and uncover the secrets of other hidden places relevant to Akron’s history. 

As such, I’ve been actively investigating a place called The Lincoln Bar. The Lincoln Bar – or, as my group and I have affectionately taken to calling it, simply, The Lincoln – was a gay bar at first 13 and later 28 South Howard Street from 1948 to 1967. It was part of Akron’s jazz neighborhood. Not only was The Lincoln a gay bar, but it’s often considered to be Akron’s first gay bar. That being said, finding out just about anything else about it has been nearly impossible. 

With the help of two fairly detailed theses and a small handful of articles from the Akron Beacon Journal, I was able to paste together a half-baked semi-story about this place that had existed for nearly twenty years, but beyond that? Nothing. Despite my best efforts, The Lincoln remains more like an urban legend than the real, four-walled, possibly brick-built building it was. 

The information I did manage to scrounge up was rudimentary at best. I learned that the bar moved at some point, but not the exact year during which it did. I learned that it had three different owners and was only able to find when it changed hands thanks to obituaries in The Akron Beacon Journal. I learned that it was host to a number of unsavory events – muggings, beatings, illegal liquor sales, the death of its owner – via one or two sentences sprinkled across a number of papers. Past that? Zilch.

One of the more notable reports of trouble surrounding the Lincoln Bar. Mentions like this were among the few reasons the bar became part of the written record. Akron Beacon Journal. July 2, 1960

For being Akron’s first recorded gay bar you’d think there might be more information on the place, but, in a way, it makes sense that there’s not. Gay marriage became legal less than a decade ago and even now – in 2024, almost sixty years since the closing of The Lincoln – queer people face discrimination.

So why, then, would The Lincoln want to draw attention to itself, especially when most of the press coverage it was getting was negative? One upsetting fact of history is that it tends to be written by the victors and in cases like these where the battles lay hidden between police raids and bad press the victor just so happens to be the majority, so it only makes sense that a place inhabited by the minority would want to avoid being actively known. 

The Lincoln, and many other queer spaces during its time, may have remained hidden for its own safety and that of its patrons. On the other hand, it could have just as easily been purposefully erased like so many places are when the majority wants them to remain so. The loss of documentation and recordings of historically minority-inhabited spaces is a common enough occurrence that it wouldn’t entirely be surprising to hear this had happened in this case. 

All that being said, unlike history, the future can change, and I hope that as time moves forward we can aim to tell stories from other perspectives so that The Lincolns of The Now can be known to those in the future. 

Have information or stories about the Lincoln Bar? Contact us at roundhowardstreet@gmail.com.

Sources: 

Monegan, Max Turner. 2018. A Different Kind of Community: Queerness and Urban Ambiguity in Northeast Ohio, 1945-1980.

“Asks Again To Shift His Liquor Permit.” Akron Beacon Journal. October 25, 1967.

“State Board Cites 2 Akron Drink Spots.” Akron Beacon Journal. April 17, 1955.

Investigating Howard Street’s Cosmopolitan Club, Part 2

by Maddie Smith, Greer Brightbill, Olivia Kurylo, and Rachael Herman

At the start of our ‘Round Howard Street UnClass this semester we were met with a sense of urgency of finding information to add to current understanding of Akron’s lost community on Howard Street — something that has been torn away during urban renewal. Our group interest was piqued by the Cosmopolitan Club’s stub entry on the Green Book Cleveland site that only gave us a location at 33 ½ N Howard St and active dates between 1947-1955. We were determined to begin a working profile of the Club so that, once our group research is done, even more information can be added to by future classes as they keep up the work.

Eight weeks later and we have found an abundance of various newspaper articles, archival sources, and images. This research that has been done within this short amount of time can only scratch the surface. But in the time span we have had, it seems like the world of difference because, beforehand, there was only an address and a date. We were able to find information on managers that ran the club, celebrations that were held on site, music performances, and various other events.

Above is a photo from the University of Akron Archives from the Stewart collection. It is unfortunately undated, but gives us a great insight on what the Cosmopolitan Clubs looked like during a performance.

For example, we were able to confirm that the Cosmopolitan Club had its liquor license from an article from the Akron Beacon Journal in 1945. We also found an instance of the club violating the provisions of the Liquor Control Act due to the sale of liquor to minors. That article states that during a court proceeding for an armed robbery, one of the men on trial stated in his testimony that he frequented the Cosmopolitan Club for their floor shows, and he was able to get in without a membership and was also served alcohol. Readers will be able to visit the Green Book Cleveland link for more information on this and other crime surrounded some of the musicians who performed in the Cosmopolitan. For example, Clifford Johnson, a saxophone player who often performed at the Cosmopolitan Club, was murdered in the Colonial Theatre.

There seem to be common figures present within the Cosmopolitan and other businesses on Howard Street. For example, Charles Fitzhugh owned the Cosmopolitan but also co-owned the J.C. Wade Dance Studio as well. Additionally, many musicians and performers that frequented the Cosmopolitan have been identified. We knew as a group that there were going to be so many connections within our project to other places. Due to these expanding connections, our final group project has developed into a community discussion post type of website. In the coming days, we are looking forward to putting this together to display all of the information that our group has found. 

Our last update via blog post will be published in just two short weeks; in the coming weeks we will be adding all of our information to our website and preparing it to be published. As a group, we are looking forward to all the information that we have found to be showcased to the community. It proves that within such a short time (a 16-week semester) how much information can be found and how much light can be shed on a lost community. Within a situation like this, all we need is community motivation to find as much as we can to pass the torch on to others, and we have it. 

Sources: 

“Hits Sale of Liquor to Minors.” The Akron Beacon Journal. December 9, 1945. Page 2. 

Photo. Stewart Collection from The University of Akron Archives. Undated.

Ponder, Prepare, Publish: Submitting our Howard Street Locations on the Green Book Cleveland Project Site

by Rachel Ickes and Emily Price

Currently, in the ‘Round Howard Street UnClass, we are working on posting our writing to the Green Book Cleveland Project. This project, led by Prof. Mark Souther of Cleveland State University, showcases places where Black individuals could safely visit in Ohio during Jim Crow segregation. The role of our class is to showcase more businesses specifically on Howard Street that served Black residents and visitors. 

Image Credit: Screenshot of the greenbookcleveland.org homepage

Students in the class are given roles as either “author” or “editor” on the website, which determines their access to certain aspects. We created this blog entry as a resource for students to use when adding their Green Book entries as well as inform the public about our work with the site to bring a light to the businesses we have been carefully researching.

Maps / Locations

On the Green Book Cleveland website, all of the different establishments that they have information available on are divided into categories based on the type of place, such as: hotels, resorts, music clubs, etc. Some places can be established under more than one category so that they are easier for the user to find. 

For our role as student authors / editors, we are plugging in the information about the site name and location on a map. For reference, since most of Howard Street is no longer around, and because the site uses current maps as its base, we will be using Market Street to delineate North and South Howard Street and approximate the street addresses for our locations. This is a slightly different practice than previously used, when the Green Book site contained fewer Howard Street addresses. For reference, here is a map and the location of the Green Turtle Hotel , which was located at the now-nonexistent corner of Federal & N. Howard Streets, entered by a student last term.

Screenshot of the location of the Green Turtle Hotel (information entered by Russell Pier)

Style

The Green Book Cleveland Project makes information available and accessible to the public. Our goal is to maintain a consistent and readable style, avoiding academic jargon. Depending on how much information is available about the places we chose, we aim for about 1,000 words for each Green Book entry. We will be linking Green Book entries together using hyperlinks whenever possible, too.

Images

From our meeting with Mark Souther, we realized we need to take care in tracking the sources of photos for copyright purposes. We also learned how to cite our pictures using a general format to include as much info as concisely as we can, making sure to give credit to the archival agencies taking care of the images we use for this project.

Not only that, but if we have multiple images, Prof. Souther showed us how we can include a small gallery to showcase ads or pictures of our place. We can either use the media library of already existing images or we can upload images around the size of a couple hundred KB.

Resources

The resources we used to write our Green Book entry will be listed at the bottom of the site. We are consistently using a Chicago adjacent formatting style that includes citations. It is important to include resources not only to give credit to the information we accessed, but so the public can learn more about the place through additional resources. Our citations are available for their search!

Screenshot of the resources section for the Green Turtle Inn.

The Green Book Cleveland Project entries are a culmination of digging into the course materials and researching more about specific places pertaining to Howard Street. We hope that you can soon see more of this collaborative effort on the Green Book Cleveland page Home – Green Book Cleveland as we learn more about the website and how to upload our info! 

A Sports Connection: The Rhythm Bar, the Cabin Club, and Women’s Softball

by Rachel Ickes

The Rhythm Bar, located at 124 N Howard St. alongside the Ritz Plaza Hotel, has been a special interest of mine throughout the course of our ‘Round Howard Street UnClass. Both the hotel and the bar were owned by Samuel Barner and Mitchell Wadley, and by the 1950s, they also owned the Cabin Club (formerly the Drift Inn Club), an African American Club that operated in Cuyahoga Valley from 1946-1966. It’s notable that they saw benefits to owning businesses downtown and in the valley, because they had a wide range of activities available so that everybody was able to find something they enjoy doing at one of their establishments.

What really surprised me was that while researching the Rhythm Bar most of the newspaper articles that surfaced were about the women’s sports teams associated with the bar, promoting the teams as well as showing that they play their games at the Cabin Club. As a recent article by the National Park Service shows, the Cabin Club wanted to promote baseball because of its popularity as a team sport. One way for them to get people interested in the game was to promote their own team, the Rhythm Bar Girls. There were constantly ads in the paper promoting the team and reviewing the score of the previous games played.

Cleveland Gazette (June 25, 1955) 

The popularity of softball was probably also due to the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League or AAGPBL which began playing in 1943. It is safe to assume that women’s sports became more popular, so the Rhythm Bar and Cabin Club were able to provide a place for those women to explore their interest in sports. As there are nine people on the field at a time, baseball was able to facilitate a team sporting environment while letting a good amount of people play at once. This would allow the Cabin Club to get more people to their club and would also be promoting the Rhythm Bar at the same time.

The Rhythm Bar itself was able to provide a relaxed environment for jazz musicians and enthusiasts alike during its years of operation. Tickets to see musicians like Buddy Johnson and Ella Johnson who were performing at the Armory were sold at the Rhythm Bar in what could be an effort to keep the jazz scene alive by promoting customers to explore other bars. The jazz community was so strong in Akron and provided more than just music to the locals, it helped to build a society that let people express themselves in more than one way

The Akron Beacon Journal (December 31, 1947) 

References:

https://baseballhall.org/discover-more/stories/baseball-history/league-of-women-ballplayers

https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-akron-beacon-journal/143653120

Boedie’s Mystery Painting… of Howard Street?

by Avery Bishop

To be both a well known and an unknown local artist is a contradictory achievement in the wide world of the arts. Arnold E. Boedeker, who signed his art as Boedie, is one of these peculiar artists that locals in Akron can either greatly recall or have no idea who he was, even with the fact that he had painted scenes of the historic Howard Street.

Painting with Boedie signature, by owner permission.

Boedie (1893-1985) was born in Wisconsin, but his artistic presence was most felt in Akron, Ohio in the middle of the twentieth century. After being commissioned for commercial work for Goodyear, including having a hand in creating its iconic logo, his expertise in watercoloring led him to establish his own style. He joined and sometimes co-founded several groups to share his work, including the Whiskey Painters of America, the Akron Society of Artists, the Cuyahoga Valley Art Club, and more. However, it is in his time in and around Akron in which some of his art opens up a bit of mystery.

While some of Boedie’s work is archived online and locally, many of his pieces have not been scanned and remain as gifts or household centerpieces for friends and family. One of these pieces, the unnamed street piece above, is even more peculiar because of  its apparent origins.

Based on recollection from its owner, the piece is supposedly a watercolor rendering of a part of Howard Street, or at the very least, inspired by areas like it. After all, at least one of Boedie’s paintings featured a Howard Street location: the Walsh Bros. Cigar Store on the corner of Market and Howard. This opens up a whole new mystery as another piece of the Howard Street puzzle; if this is a part of a block on either side of the area, what address is it representing? 

Walsh Bros. Cigar Store, from Mutualart.com

The New Deal Food Store featured in the piece does not directly appear in any Akron city directory of the era it was probably produced in, so does this piece give us an artist slice of Howard Street or does it reflect another corner of both Akron and American Society in the middle of the twentieth century? Questions like these, as sometimes unanswerable as they are, can open so much more discussion about Howard Street and the arts in America.

Think you have got the answer or have additional information and thoughts on the beautiful art of Boedie? Reach out to us – our email (roundhowardstreet@gmail.com) and social media (@roundhowardstreetunclass) are always open as we continue our exploration and restoration of the history of Howard Street!

Links:

Arnold E. (Boedie) Boedeker – Biography (askart.com)

Canton Museum of Art Collection (cantonartcollection.com)