Photograph by Claudia Hershner
The first essay Melanie Moon read in Race and the City: Work, Community, and Protest in Cincinnati, 1820–1970 explored what seemed to be a paradox. In the face of rapidly accelerating professional opportunities in Cincinnati in the latter half of the 19th century, why had Black Cincinnatians been left out?
The inability to access lucrative new work opportunities made no sense to Moon. The stifling Black Laws, designed to discourage free Blacks from settling in Ohio, had been repealed. And yet, as jobs exploded in areas like plumbing, electrical, manufacturing, and clerical work, the occupational status of Black people in Cincinnati actually worsened. Census data tells the story: Black people would not gain widespread access to these professions until the 1940s, at which time the jobs were increasingly obsolete. “Chapter 5 is the first one I read when I got the book,” Moon recalls of Nancy Bertaux’s “Structural Economic Change and Occupational Decline Among Black Workers in Nineteenth-Century Cincinnati.” “It suddenly became very clear to me how the wealth gap originated.”
A retired librarian and SilverSneakers instructor, Moon first encountered Race and the City while researching the history of housing in Cincinnati for her volunteer work on a 10-year plan for Evanston. She learned not only the history of Evanston—that it became a predominantly Black neighborhood as the result of planned population shifts that most directly impacted Avondale—but also Cincinnati’s role as a national pioneer in residential zoning that kept Black people from the wealth-building potential of home ownership. How had she not known this before, she wondered.
Published in 1993 as a part of the Greater Cincinnati Bicentennial History Series and now out of print, Race and the City relied on archival research and U.S. Census data to document the experience of Black residents across generations. “The conceptual framework is that the city does not stand still,” explains editor and historian Henry Louis Taylor Jr. “[The city] moves through time and space, and the process of its moving is what drives the challenges that are facing Black people. And those challenges shift as the city moves, but what never changes is the deplorable conditions under which Black residents live. So, in Cincinnati and elsewhere, in every single stage in the process of building the city, Black people are living in the most deplorable, undesirable, and unhealthy places in the urban environment.”
Race and the City features 10 chapters by different writers, including one by Taylor himself in addition to his introduction. The project was a joint venture of the Cincinnati Historical Society and the University of Cincinnati’s history department.
For Moon, Race and the City was a jaw-dropping explanation of the city she’d lived in her entire life. She quickly felt informed and mobilized. “I was determined that every Cincinnatian needed to read that book,” she says, and her words became a rallying cry.
Taylor, who became aware of her efforts, regards Moon with appreciation and awe. “Her efforts represented the essence of everything I’d ever dreamed about and hoped might happen,” he says. “She has shown the possibility and potential power that flow from people taking knowledge related to the world in which they live and making that knowledge their own so that they can use it in their own creative ways.”
Moon’s journey began with a question that was on her mind as soon as she finished the chapter on the economy: How do I get this information out to people?
Photograph by Claudia Hershner
Moon knew that the academic language and hard-copy scarcity of Race and the City would deter most Cincinnatians. She decided to go old school: She would read the book aloud. She enlisted her son to help her set up a YouTube channel and started recording.
Her voice snaps with authority and confidence as she delivers lines like these, which detail the establishment of the West End in the 1920s: “The residential options of Black Cincinnatians were severely limited by their low incomes. Much of the new owner-occupied and rental housing units were beyond their economic reach. The residential land-rent structure, then, forced the majority of African Americans to search for housing in the low-rent district, located in the West End of the basin. By 1930 more than 30,000 Black people, comprising 67 percent of the African American population, lived here.”
Moon’s vision was for the channel to become an online book club where people could engage with each other, but that didn’t really happen. Comments were enthusiastic but sporadic, so she used the readings as a foundation for programming that would bring people together in a different way.
She designed the course “Race and the City: Cincinnati, 1820–Present” and ran it on Zoom in fall 2020. She’s now teaching it in as little as a single three-hour session for UC’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) as well as a weekly course spread across several months. I encountered Moon in spring 2025 when I took the course through the Harriet Beecher Stowe House via 12 two-hour sessions. Whatever amount of time she has to work with, she focuses on the chapters that are most pertinent to what’s going on today, which in her mind are housing and the economy.
Moon includes what she calls “enhancements” that allow classmates to connect with each other to explore a topic related to the reading. “I was trying to think of ways to keep students engaged,” she says. “I started with enhancements—not calling it homework, but ways to enhance your knowledge. And so it just started to blossom.”
In one enhancement, a partner and I signed up to learn more about Covert, Michigan, after reading Chapter 4, which traces census data from 1850 to explore housing patterns that ultimately demonstrate how Cincinnati was more racially integrated than people tend to think today. Covert, founded in 1860, has been racially integrated for five generations, including civic functions, schools, and graveyards.
Moon provided us with a podcast, a slide deck, a news article and—this was the part that amazed me—a recent interview she’d completed with a Covert resident about changes to the town since 2016. Her interview questions had been developed by previous Race and the City students.
Another way Moon encourages students to get involved is by serving as “chapter champions,” summarizing the content of a given chapter for others. Her first champions included her adult children and her friends, including Carol Wade. “Melanie just has a lot of credibility in my mind,” says Wade, smiling. “There’s something about her that just always makes me want to do what she asks me to do.”
Wade grew up in Springfield, Ohio, which is smaller and more racially integrated than Cincinnati, where she moved just after college. “The culture was different,” she recalls. “So it took me a minute to sort of understand where I was.”
She championed Chapter 7, “Cincinnati Blacks and the Irony of Low-Income Housing Reform, 1900–1950” by Robert Fairbanks, which details how reform efforts produced housing units that were unavailable to Black residents or displaced Black families, ultimately leaving more than 600 families vulnerable to relocation and predatory lending practices.
Illustration courtesy "Race and the City: Art"
Moon asked her early chapter champions to record their summaries via video, and there’s now a suite of them. One was Lester Tacy, who grew up in Lexington and didn’t know a lot about Cincinnati history. “At times I’ve felt a little bit like I’m intruding, because I come from the white perspective, but this has been a very welcoming environment because people really want to learn,” he says. “The experience has made me more aware of my unconscious bias.”
Maggie Shreve grew up in Mt. Washington not far from Coney Island and took Moon’s class twice, first through OLLI and then through Anderson Hills Church. She championed Chapter 11, which explores the differing strategies of Black organizations such as the Urban League of Cincinnati to desegregate the city in the 1950s. “Growing up in a white neighborhood, I remember people talking about how Black people had dirtied the water at the Coney Island pool and they were never going to get the pool clean,” she says.
Shreve relays these memories, as well as another memory of a Black child who had managed to get into the pool only to be escorted out, in her chapter video. “When I found this class, I was just blown away,” she says. “And Melanie was very much an enthusiast, a fan, an advocate.”
“People don’t want to hear from me all the time,” says Moon about her concept of chapter champions. “The more people I can get involved in reading, discussing, and presenting this information the better. And I want each student to feel welcome, safe, and free to express themselves.” She keeps the Zoom room open after class to answer questions for those who prefer not to ask during class.
In spring 2021, the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County hosted the Race and the City course in a three-event sequence. Civic Engagement Coordinator David Siders says that after meeting Moon and wanting to contribute to understanding the Black Lives Matter movement as well as upgrade the library’s virtual community connections during the pandemic, he recommended adopting the course. The result was “more rewarding than I could have imagined,” he says, recalling that there were 30 or so participants on Zoom for each event.
Siders says the course deepened his previous understanding of the city’s development, which felt as if it had formed in “bits and pieces.” He had a sense of the riverboat era, the development of tenement housing, and the corporate people moving to the northern suburbs. “I now have a much more deep and cohesive understanding and timeline of how systems developed in our city,” he says. He especially appreciated chapters that detailed urban renewal in the 1930s and ’40s and federal government plans for community housing in the West End.
As a result of the class, Siders says he’s able to hold deeper conversations with family and friends. “I’m able to engage others, hear their stories, and let it kind of assimilate into my own knowledge and understanding,” he says. “I’m just more open, and I feel a deeper richness and gratitude when people share their stories now.”
Photograph by Claudia Hershner
Moon’s course was off and rolling, and then she discovered another aspect to add to make the book even more accessible. “I had the videos and the chapter champions, but I wanted something else to draw people in,” she says. “And art is universal.”
A student in one of her classes suggested Moon reach out to Saad Ghosn, a retired medical doctor who had founded Save Our Souls (SOS) ART Cincinnati, a nonprofit whose mission is to promote peace and justice. “I wanted Cincinnati artists because it’s a Cincinnati book,” she says.
Published in 2022, Ghosn’s Race and the City: Art book, freely available online, features artistic responses to each chapter of Race and the City. The project brought together poets, performance groups, professional visual artists, and student visual artists—more than 60 artists in all.
Joan Ferrante, a sociology professor at Northern Kentucky University, is the founder of the nonprofit Mourning the Creation of Racial Categories (MCRC), one of the performance groups. Her team created a gripping seven-minute film about John Mercer Langston (see Chapter 2), who was born to an emancipated slave in 1829 and raised by a white family before coming to Cincinnati at age 10 to be with his older brother Gideon, a barber. A mural commissioned by BLINK in 2019 near Findlay Market honors him.
Langston’s identity and life were changed forever by witnessing the Riot of 1841, when a mob of white men attacked and destroyed the neighborhood known as Little Africa. Dozens of Black residents were murdered, and many fled the city, including Langston. He subsequently graduated from Oberlin College, passed the bar to become a defense attorney, was elected a congressman from Virginia, and served as the first dean of law at Howard University.
“The two years in Cincinnati qualifies as life-altering, irrevocably shaping all that lies ahead,” says the film’s narrator, local actor Darnell Pierre Benjamin. “We celebrate a man who reinvented himself, who wished for ‘midnight darkness’ skin to separate himself from the worst of whites.” The film concludes with an image of the light-skinned Langston in a barber chair, as a darker-complected hand combs back his hair, an homage to his brother Gideon.
“I think Langston’s story puts everything into perspective,” says Ferrante. “It’s really hard to talk broadly about what race did to people. It’s complex. Race was used to divide people, even family. But his is a human story instead of one about structure, and that touches the heart a lot.”
Another artist, Kevin Harris, chose old Coney Island postcards as the backdrop for digital collages portraying the themes of Chapter 11, “Behind the Scenes: The Cincinnati Urban League 1948–63.” He recalls reading the chapter multiple times and, when certain portions of the essay stood out, writing down key words and phrases.
“I started to look for images that might be available online from that period, from the protests, from the marches, and that sort of thing,” says Harris. “And for some reason a lot of Coney Island postcards came up, which seemed to have nothing to do with what I was looking for.”
Marian Spencer famously led the effort to desegregate Coney Island, working for almost 10 years on lawsuits and public pressure before the park finally admitted Black swimmers in 1961. Two decades later she’d be elected Cincinnati’s first African American female city councilmember.
Moon knows that the learning process is slow for uncovering our collective history of race relations and many Cincinnatians will resist it altogether. When readers and students encounter information that’s contrary to what they were taught in school or believe, there can be cognitive dissonance. “Are you going to stay in the learning space, work through it, and figure it out, or are you going to throw it away?” says Moon. “That’s a difficult space for a lot of people.”
Shreve notes that Cincinnati’s history on race relations is complicated. “We participated in the Underground Railroad in the mid-1800s, but a lot of people in town were opposed to that,” she says. “We had multiple race riots. Cincinnati was really a southern town in many ways, which I think is a hard thing for Cincinnatians to admit.”
A review of the Urban League’s latest report on Black life in Cincinnati, Journey to Parity, which relies on data from 2016 through 2023, suggests that disparities highlighted in Bertaux’s chapter in Race and the City still exist. The median income for Black families here was $31,520 versus $70,909 for white families, and Black residents have a lower life expectancy and higher rates of illness than white residents. And yet the report indicates that more Black people regard Cincinnati as inclusive than in 2015, with 71 percent of respondents saying that they’re satisfied by their lives here.
Moon has no intention of slowing her quest for every Cincinnatian to read Race and the City, continuing to offer her course and creating new programming for children. “I will enter any doors that open to me,” she says.
