09/21/2024
Emancipation Day: Freeing the Mindset to Begin That Spiritual Journey of Faith
The Little Miami River originates in Clark County, OH. The county seat is Springfield. Springfield became the subject of a politicized campaign announced by Ohio Senator J.D. Vance and former president Donald J. Trump who launched Springfield into the national spotlight in the Presidential Debate with the charge that Haitian immigrants were eating cats or domestic pets of the people of Springfield, OH. The Republican Mayor of Springfield asserted that there were no truths to the political claims and Ohio governor Mike DeWine whose home is in close proximity has labeled the allegations as having no credibility and being hurtful to the management of the city after numerous bomb threats had shutdown city hall and public schools in the city. Governor DeWine, also a Republican was forced to send in Ohio State Highway Patrolmen to make sure of the security and safety to all of the citizens.
The DeWine’s live in close proximity to Springfield and his wife Fran’s family came to the area in 1814 from Virginia. Mike DeWine, is also a native Greene Countian and was born in Yellow Springs, north of Xenia on Route 68 where both not long ago were touring the newest of Ohio’s State Park in Old Town, a Shawnee Native American Park believed to be the birthplace of Tecumseh. This new park abuts the Little Miami River, the first riverway to be designated a National Scenic River in the State of Ohio and across the street is a bike and walking trail coursing its way to the Ohio River as it passes through the city of Loveland, a community that is arguably the greatest promoter of its natural beauty with access to the kayaking, biking and walking trails. While Mike DeWine definitely has notoriety in Yellow Springs, he can’t compare to the celebrity of Dave Chappelle the world- famous comedian, who makes his home there in Yellow Springs.
There are two HBCU’s located just a few miles east of the Old Town site of the Great Council State Park. One is my alma mater of Central State University and the other from which CSU sprang is Wilberforce, one of the oldest Black colleges in the nation. Wilberforce was founded in 1856, the same year the Republican Party was founded and in the decade before the Emancipation Proclamation. As a native of Loveland, OH I know there were conductors at stations in the Loveland area who figured prominently in forwarding fugitives seeking freedom through this area following the course of the Little Miami River stations of the Underground Railroad into the Xenia and Wilberforce area. Then too there were the stories of emancipated slaves often fathered by their slave masters who sent their children to be educated at Wilberforce. Other families migrating north after Emancipation and the Civil War in the Jim Crow era, like Miss Daisy Simpson and Mrs. Lott Smith, attended Wilberforce. Both the Simpsons and the Smiths like my family had been enslaved in Madison and Garrard counties in Kentucky. Mrs. Smith who wrote a history of the Loveland Predestinarian Baptist Church, was my neighbor on Center St. whose home I would later own.
As a retired Black History teacher living in Piqua, OH and a native of Loveland, Oh I know that there are many stories connecting the towns and cities along the waterways that could and should be promoting the Freedom’s Struggle narrative tied to these many stations. In Loveland the Little Miami River and its tributary the Obanion Creek uniquely divides the city into Warren, Clermont and Hamilton Counties.
On a more personal level I grew up only three blocks from the Little Miami River, whereas the only son of my father we bonded while fishing on the Little Miami and we dined as a family on the catfish taken frequently from its banks or the pier straddling the Little Miami. The story of Uncle Dee and his heroism in the 1913 flood is another chapter of the social and political division that has always been present and continues to erupt from the smoldering fires that we thought we had stomped out long ago.
I told you about Uncle Dee leaving Loveland, and then working during WW I in the 'Sundown' town of Bradford in Miami County and then moving to Springfield, OH where his mother Lucy’s sister, Narcis lived with her large extended family groups. Uncle Dee died in Springfield but…
