You probably haven't heard about the "Marching Mothers" in Hillsboro. I hadn't. Neither had filmmaker Andrea Torrice until a Hillsboro historian asked her to interview local residents involved with a two-year protest to desegregate schools after the historic U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling.
"Everyone knows about the protests in Little Rock, Ark., but few know about Hillsboro," says Torrice, a Clifton documentary filmmaker who screens The Lincoln Story at 1 p.m. Sunday at the Esquire Theatre. The Lincoln Story also airs Monday on WCET-TV (5 p.m., Channel 48).
The Hillsboro school board refused to allow Black students to attend all-white Webster or Washington elementary schools in the fall of 1954, after the Supreme Court ruling. School officials insisted they stay in the old two-room all-Black Lincoln School, an 1800s two-story building with two classrooms — one for first, second and third grade and another for fourth, fifth and sixth. The Cincinnati Post reported that Lincoln School had 60 students and two teachers in October 1954.
So five mothers sued the school district with the help of NAACP attorneys Thurgood Marshall and Constance Baker Motley.
And every school day the mothers and children marched through town with picket signs for two years, until they won the lawsuit in April 1956.
"We'd march down Walnut Street all the way to the Webster school every morning, as if we were expected to be admitted," says Joyce Clemons Kittrell, daughter of Gertrude Clemons.
"We would get there, and then the principal would come out. He would say, 'Sorry ladies, nothing has changed.' I remember one time we went in, and we sat down in the hall, but we were escorted out," she said.
The protest — started 15 months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery Ala. — was "one of the longest civil rights marches in U.S. history, and helped compel other civil rights groups to go forward with other lawsuits," says Torrice, who started interviewing Hillsboro residents in 2017 with help from the Highland County Historical Society. The film features Elsie Steward Young, one of the five women who sued the school board in 1954, and six daughters of the original protestors.
In all, 19 mothers and 37 children marched for school integration in Hillsboro, Torrice says. Some of the children who participated in the protest never returned to Lincoln School. They were home schooled or tutored by Quaker teachers from nearby Wilmington College.
Two of the mothers lost their jobs as domestic workers in Hillsboro residences because of their protest. Two crosses were burned in the city, including one in the front of a home.
"All of us had some fear, but we had to just keep pushing," said Elsie Steward Young, the last surviving mother.
"My mother, she was always brave. She was fearless of nothing. She was always ready to fight for us. I knew she was always there to protect me," says Myra Cumberland Phillips, daughter of Zella Mae Cumberland.
The Lincoln School Story also includes the perspective of Carleen Alexander, a white Webster Elementary School student.
"The mothers carried signs. They were very quiet and peaceful. But it's not something we talked about at school. In fact, Mrs. Calvert would go over and pull the window blinds down and not say a word about what was going on outside."
After winning the lawsuit, the school board made Black students take proficiency tests before attending the white schools. Elsie's daughter, Carolyn Steward Goins, says she was "put back two years."
Virginia Steward Harewood, also Elsie's daughter, says white children refused to play with her at recess.
"They apologized to me and told me that if their parents came by and saw them playing with me, then they would be in trouble. It bothered me so bad that I spent most of my time inside," Harewood says.
The film concludes by noting that Hillsboro's marching mothers were inducted into the Ohio Civil Rights Hall of Fame in 2017.
"In this little quiet town of Hillsboro, in the middle of nowhere, were these very brave and courageous women," Torrice says. "This is an inspirational story that needs to be told about the early days of the Civil Rights movement."
A free screening of The Lincoln School Story will be held at 1 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 25, at the Esquire Theater, 320 Ludlow Ave., Clifton, followed by a panel discussion. The film will air Monday, Feb. 26r on WCET-TV (5 p.m., Channel 48). It also can viewed on the PBS website.
