There’s an all-white Boys’ Club in Hamilton. The very life breath and operation of the city subsists on the existence of this fraternity.
They don’t have an official meeting place, no Honeycomb Hideout or anything like that. It’s not even really officially a club per se, but everyone knows it’s there like the lingering malodorous fog of a fart that everyone tries to ignore.
Black folks in Hamilton have lived under the pall and oppressive thumb — with a few lackluster exceptions — of majority government and media representation for all of the city’s existence. Racially, socially and economically delineated by the river running through it, Hamilton is also divided on far subtler levels. Again, unspoken.
Growing up there, I always knew something wasn’t quite right, that as blacks we had a “place” that excluded those who weren’t exactly like us. “They” were over there and “we” were some place else, usually in the Second Ward.
My family moved out fairly early on, but as an adult I went back to work there as a reporter for The Journal-News, the moderately sized daily serving Butler County.
Working there proved to be the manifestation of all my childhood inklings about race, gender and economic politics done up the Hamilton way.
The city has machinations all its own, and they’d been played out by the daily paper. There was a period when the only time you’d see a black person on the front page was in profile holding a placard with a police serial number on it. Either that or on the obituary page.
When I got there, a black female reporter had just left to work at Miami University. That left me and another black woman, who was immediately fired for a hodgepodge of reasons. And that left me as the Spook Who Sat by the Door, literally. (Thinking back, I’m not so sure that placing me by the newsroom’s entrance wasn’t a publicity stunt, as in, “See? We got one!”)
This column might be titled Your Negro Tour Guide, but my secret mantle while in Hamilton was the same: Your Negro Tour Guide, or Their Negro Tour Guide, as it were. I found myself, sometimes by choice, sometimes subconsciously and other times out of anger and frustration, guiding (in print and in person) the ignorant, misguided, misogynistic and myopic alike through a landscape of hot-potato issues heretofore ignored and overlooked.
Because of what my then-managing editor called my “perspective” (read that as “black, female, outspoken and local”), I received a weekly column and was also batted around from beat to beat — education, urban affairs, minority affairs (whatever those are), general assignment, night cops.
Though I hadn’t had any professional journalism training before The Journal, I was baptized in a pool of fire wearing gasoline drawers and the weight — self-imposed and otherwise — of carrying the city’s backward-thinking citizenry on my back while mind-fucking and out-maneuvering one crazed city desk editor in particular who nearly broke my spirit and almost permanently scrambled my marbles. (Note: This was the same editor who, in the wake of the O.J. Simpson verdict, asked me to make “introductions” for white reporters venturing into the black neighborhood seeking reaction from patrons of one of the black barber shops.)
I’m moving soon, and packing up the writing awards I garnered while at The Journal hardly seems worth the pain and mental anguish of the five years and one month I toiled there. In short, life’s hard for a black woman at that paper.
I guess that’s why I’m so intrigued with Edwina Blackwell Clark, the 38-year-old black woman recently named to succeed Robert Murphy as editor and publisher of The Journal.
Only three years older than me, Clark’s been in the game a lot longer, having spent 14 years at The Dayton Daily News as well as a stint at The Cincinnati Post. She’s a native of Springfield, a city I know nothing about but I’ll wager is nothing like Hamilton. Then again, what is?
Whatever her intentions, plans, outlook or agenda, I wish Clark Godspeed and good mental health, and I hope she kicks ass — whatever that means for her. Mostly, I hope she goes in and cleans house.
And from what I can tell of the paper since I and several cronies jumped ship, that house is filthy. I hope her briefcase is big enough to accommodate a bucket, a mop and a broom.
After all, she’s a black woman. Certainly she knows all about cleaning house.
CONTACT KATHY Y. WILSON: kwilson@citybeat.com
This article appears in Dec 13-19, 2000.
