Image extracted from microfilm by Greg Hand
Nearly 100 years ago, Dabney published one of the most important books ever written about the Queen City, Cincinnati’s Colored Citizens. It appeared in 1926 and is still essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the region’s rich history. At a time when Black people faced unrelenting persecution and segregation, Dabney compiled an exhaustive and almost encyclopedic record of African Americans in Cincinnati. His book highlights the accomplishments and points of pride of a thriving community derided and stereotyped by the majority power structure.
On page after page, Dabney documented hundreds of Black citizens raising respectable families, owning solid and profitable businesses, and residing in homes better than those occupied by many of Cincinnati’s white residents. He demonstrated that Black professionals thrived in Cincinnati despite legal and societal prejudice, and he showcased charitable institutions created, constructed, and funded by Black generosity, including an orphanage, social clubs, churches, schools, and homes for the elderly. Almost a century later, Dabney’s book is the only available source for information about Black Cincinnatians before the civil rights era.
Dabney promoted his personal political agenda through his own newspapers, the first in Cincinnati aimed at an African American audience. He published the inaugural issue of The Ohio Enterprise in 1902, changed the name of the paper in 1907 to The Union, and single-handedly published that paper until his death in 1952.
Image extracted from microfilm by Greg Hand
A big fan of Dabney’s was Alfred Segal, the Cincinnati Post writer known by his byline as “Cincinnatus.” Segal often shared items from Dabney’s columns with his own readers. According to Segal [27 August 1950], The Union was less a news medium and more of a lectern for the irrepressible Dabney:
“It hasn’t been really a newspaper in the sense of handing out the latest news; it has been more of a reflection of Wendell P. Dabney himself and how he thinks and feels about everything. It is a paper for colored citizens but many white ones read it just to get the flash of Mr. Dabney’s mordant humor.”
While it is true that his newspaper published many wry examples of the editor’s humor, Dabney was an untiring opponent of segregation. For much of his life, integration was a controversial position among Blacks as well as whites. Many in the Black community believed that segregated schools, hospitals and other institutions provided protective environments for African Americans. Dabney would have none of it. He wrote [30 December 1922]:
“This drawing of the color line in public institutions and establishment of ‘jim crowism’ is largely done by Negroes themselves, either through ignorance or desire for money. Civic rights legally belong to all citizens. Segregation of people is not necessary to fit them for civic duties. We have here and in other cities, colored people in nearly every profession and department of public life. ‘The Caste System’ has never done anything but degrade.”
Dabney’s health began to fail as he reached his 80th birthday in 1945 and made noises that he would soon give up publishing The Union, but soldiered on. Soon after achieving that eight-decade milestone, Dabney hopped up from his sickbed and demonstrated that he was still capable of the old buck and wing as well as some clog dances. A celebration of Dabney’s 84th birthday in 1949 attracted more than 350 guests.
The Union maintained its weekly publishing schedule until Dabney died in 1952. In an obituary of sorts, Segal observed in The Post [4 June 1952]: “He never made any money out of being a publisher; it was pay-off enough for him to hear people laughing with him.”
Wendell Dabney was born in Richmond, Virginia just after the South surrendered in defeat to end the Civil War. His parents, John M. Dabney and Elizabeth Foster Dabney, had been enslaved but built a successful catering business after achieving freedom.
Dabney graduated high school in Richmond and began appearing on stage, sometimes with tap-dance legend Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, a childhood companion. He later attended Oberlin College in Ohio and performed in that school’s orchestra.
After teaching for a couple of years in Virginia, Dabney relocated to Cincinnati to manage property inherited by his mother, including the Dumas House, the only Cincinnati hotel that accepted Black guests.
Intending to stay in Cincinnati just long enough to stabilize his mother’s properties, Dabney was introduced to a young widow with two children, Nellie Foster Jackson. They married in 1897 and Dabney credited Nellie with his later accomplishments. In Cincinnati’s Colored Citizens, he wrote about her:
“The loyalty and courage of his wife through twenty-five years of storm and stress engendered that domestic harmony and inspiration to which whatever success he may have attained is indebted.”
Dabney integrated himself into Cincinnati’s social and political fabric and excelled at several endeavors. He was an accomplished musician who composed and published songs and melodies and offered lessons through Cincinnati’s Wurlitzer emporium. He published a biography of his friend, Maggie L. Walker, the first African-American woman to charter a bank and the first African-American woman to serve as a bank president. Dabney was the first president of Cincinnati’s NAACP chapter and was for many years a stalwart in the local Republican Party. With the rise of the progressive Charter Committee in the 1920s, Dabney switched his allegiance to that organization.
For 26 years, he served as paymaster for the City of Cincinnati. Dabney noted dryly that, although he had been entrusted with dispersing a total of $80 million over the course of his career, his personal salary was just $150 a month. Such was the nature of political appointments under George Barnsdale “Boss” Cox. As founder and leader of the Douglass League of Negro Republicans, Dabney was an essential factor in getting out the Black vote. The Cox machine rewarded key influencers like him with jobs at City Hall.
Facebook Comments