Marion Carr Inspired Cincinnati, But Was Unable To Pursue Her Own Dreams

When a local 14-year-old became a national advocate for Black girls’ education.
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Although she used her birth name as a student, Marion was married and had a daughter while attending high school.

From the 1919 “Rostrum” Yearbook of East Night High School, Digitized by the Public Library of Cincinnati & Hamilton County

Do local civic organizations still sponsor essay contests for schoolchildren? A century ago, essay contests were a big thing and the average student could expect opportunities to enter such competitions a couple times each year. In the spring of 1913, the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce asked the city’s eighth-grade pupils to scribble their thoughts on making Cincinnati a bigger and better city.

First prize went to Melbourne Beckmann, 14, of the St. Louis School, who suggested, among other things, “Let’s make Cincinnati a good city and the growth will take care of itself.” Young Melbourne was still recovering from serious burns he suffered when a gas main exploded near his Third Street home. He went on to become president of an aluminum fabrication company on Beekman Street and earned several patents.

Juanita Corbean, 13, took second place. “If I were rich at Christmas,” she wrote, “I would give every child a gift and at Easter each child in hospitals I’d send a flower.” Juanita was blind and submitted her essay typed out in Braille. She lived a long life and appears to have married at least three times.

Third place went to Douglass School student Marion Carr, 14, whose thoughts struck such a chord that her essay found a national audience. Here is Marion’s composition in full:

“The first thing in life of any individual is an education. My first aim in life is to finish the high school, go through the university, then take up a special course in millinery. If every girl after leaving school would acquit herself in some industry, throughout the entire school system of Cincinnati, what a wonderful army of self-supporting citizens this would be. The girl in the schoolroom whose desk is always neat is usually the girl who has a cozy home and a garden of roses. For there is a motto I have always learned: ‘That the crowd is all at the bottom of the hill, but there is plenty of room at the top.’

“There is everything to be gained through the advantages offered by education; every avenue is open to those who are well informed, from the lowest occupation in life to the most exalted station. No hamlet or city or State can remain dull and behind the times which has a thrifty and highly educated population to faithfully carry out its laws.

“I love my city as I love my garden and in my chosen occupation for life I shall not be contented to reach the topmost rung alone, but shall try to lift others as I climb, and feel that this will make our beloved Cincinnati a bigger and better city.”

Marion drew upon first-hand experience when she wrote about gardening. She grew food and flowers in her backyard at 2700 Alms Place in Walnut Hills and had been honored the previous year for the quality of her vegetables. At the time, she said the best part of urban agriculture was, “We ate the garden.”

The Carr family was not wealthy, but they were apparently comfortable. Parents Marion and Josephine Carr owned the family house just off Victory Parkway at the intersection with Yale Avenue. The family was listed among the “Prominent Property Owners” in Wendell Dabney’s indispensable 1926 volume, “Cincinnati’s Colored Citizens.” Marion’s father, Marion (she was named for him, obviously) was a chauffeur, as was her older brother, Charles. Her mother was a domestic servant for the first years of the marriage but by the 1910 census was a full-time homemaker. Their house, a two-story frame building with a commodious front porch, sat on a long lot with a considerable backyard, giving Marion a lot of gardening space. Apparently well-built, it was occupied until 2005, when it was razed.

Marion Carr was in the eighth grade when her entry in a civic essay contest attracted national attention.

From Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, Image extracted from microfilm by Greg Hand

Although Marion’s submission did not take first place in the Chamber of Commerce contest, her essay ended up reaching a national readership. An excerpt of Marion’s composition was reprinted in the Douglass Booster, the student newspaper of her school. A copy of that publication reached the desk of Cincinnati School Superintendent Randall J. Condon. He was so inspired by reading it, he had Marion’s essay duplicated and sent copies to every principal in the Cincinnati school district. Condon said to the Cincinnati Post in April 1913, “The sentiment is so fine and so well expressed that I want to pass it along as an ideal for the consideration of all the children.”

Condon’s endorsement was picked up from the local papers and reprinted by out-of-town newspapers. News of the inspiring Black student in Cincinnati eventually reached the editors of The Crisis magazine, the official publication of NAACP, founded in 1910 by renowned historian, civil rights activist and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois. With obvious pride, a columnist for The Crisis caught readers up on Marion’s distinction in July of 1913. “The superintendent of schools at Cincinnati has sent to all the schools of the city a little colored girl’s answer to the question, ‘What I can and will do to make Cincinnati a bigger and better city.'”

Marion did fulfill her goal of finishing high school. She graduated from Cincinnati’s East Night High School in June of 1919. The school’s yearbook lists no student activities for her, but offers this encouragement:

“Marion, we can already see a great future before you, for from your work at East Night in the past year, we know you will succeed at U. C. and make a good teacher.”

As it turned out, even though she graduated under her birth name, Marion had been married for more than two years at the time she received her diploma, and she was the mother of a year-old daughter, Edna. Marion married Bernice Pinkard the day after Christmas in 1916. He was a chauffeur, like her father and brother. It appears that Marion fudged her age to get married without her parents’ permission. She said she was 18 on the marriage license but, according to all other documentation, she would have been just 17 years old.

There is no indication that Marion ever enrolled at the University of Cincinnati, or any other college. Outside of some freelance assignments as the Walnut Hills correspondent for Wendell Dabney’s newspaper, The Union, there is no record she pursued any type of career. She and Bernice lived with her parents until their rather sordid divorce in 1925.

And then, Marion just disappears from the records. When her daughter Edna married in 1937, it was her grandparents who made the announcement. Marion was nowhere to be found.

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