Strength Within: Evaluating Education in America, a new exhibit at Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal, tells their stories of teamwork and equality, dedication and motivation, empowerment and respect, perseverance and success. This insightful look at these institutions makes it apparent they were much more than places of learning. They imparted strength of character to the students, inspiring them to go out into the community and encourage others as educators, administrators, and coaches.
Ultimately, integration and the civil rights movement resulted in the closure of the three schools: Lockland Wayne in 1958, DePorres in 1964, and Lincoln-Grant in 1965. However, the alumni of these schools continue to contribute in leadership roles to Greater Cincinnati to this day.
Strength Within opens January 13 and runs through March 18 in the John A. Ruthven Exhibit Gallery in the center's lower level (across from the Duke Energy Children's Museum). Admission is free.
Exhibit Origins
About two years ago, Tony Yates, celebrated point guard on the national champion University of Cincinnati basketball teams of the early 1960s, and Ray Tomlin, the first African American basketball player for Xavier University, approached Museum Center about its interest in preserving the state championship basketball trophies Lockland Wayne High School won back in the 1950s.
Museum Center officials jumped at the chance to preserve the important artifacts of the city's past, but they also wanted supplementary materials to complete the story: report cards, yearbooks, letter sweaters, photographs and the oral histories of the graduates of the segregated school that served children living in Lincoln Heights between 1938 and 1958.
Yates and Tomlin introduced Museum Center staff to a large and active alumni association that was eager to cooperate. Museum officials also identified and had connections to two other schools in the area that would help to more comprehensively explore the story of local segregated education: Lincoln Grant in Covington and DePorres High School in the West End.
From the beginning, it seemed a perfect project for students to lead. They could begin by talking about the role of high school athletics but quickly would find themselves exploring the power of education in the midst of the realities of northern segregation. In the summer of 2005, Robert Probst, chair of the Graphic Design Department at UC's College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning, approached Museum Center about collaborating on a capstone project for his 37 fifth-year design students.
In September 2005, the students, under the direction of UC Professor Kristin Cullen, plunged in. Scott Gampfer, Director of History Collections for Museum Center, became the linchpin between the students and the network of alumni groups. Gampfer helped graduates of the three schools better understand what historians need. So in addition to two state championship trophies, Museum Center added a beautiful letter sweater, several varsity letters, a pair of gym shorts, yearbooks, report cards, over a hundred photographs and hours of oral history to Museum Center's permanent collections.
The students probed all those materials for insight into the story beneath the surface. Working with Ann Shepard and other reference librarians in the Cincinnati Historical Society Library, the students combed the broader collections for material that could place these three schools in a larger interpretive context.
During the first two quarters, the students undertook a variety of preliminary studies, experimenting with ways to weave together historic images, words drawn from oral histories, music, school colors, logos and mascots. During the spring quarter, the students worked in teams to find a visual language of colors, typefaces and a design that could both pose important questions and convey personal stories while also fitting into the constraints of a minimal budget.
"This turned out to be one of the best examples of community history I have been involved with in my career,"Â said Dan Hurley, Assistant Vice President for History and Research at Museum Center. "Senior citizens and 20-somethings, African Americans and whites, professional historians, designers and graduates of three defunct schools explored together a revealing topic that had long flown under the radar."Â
In the process, Museum Center saved a wealth of material that scholars 50 and 100 years from now will re-examine and find patterns that we are too close to see, Hurley added. -- www.cincymuseum.org
Posted January 9th, 2007 by ruzik_tuzik
