Masillon (Youngstown, Canton, Massillon: attorneys, neighborhoods, public school)

[Nearwest]

Hello, Ohio posters. l'm located in Chicago. Our new mayor, Lori Lighfoot, was born and reared in Masillon.


She made a reference to Masillon in her victory speech after winning the Chicago mayoral race in April. Lightfoot said that she grew up in a working family in a segregated steel town.


ls this still an accurate description of Masillon? l realize that Lightfoot hasn't lived there since she graduated from high school nearly 40 years ago.


Also, l'm aware that the steel industry in the US has been in decline since the 1970s and that many well-paying unionized jobs have been eliminated.

[JR_C]

I grew up in the Massillon/Canton area, but my family is more closely tied to Massillon than Canton. I left the area for a job in nearby Youngstown, in 2000. So, I'm not as connected to the area, as I used to be.


The area still has plenty of heavy industry. I believe the Timken Company is still the largest employer in the area, for example. But, like the rest of the rust belt, the area has less industry than it did in the past.


As for segregation, I think it was (and still is) driven more by economics than race, at least locally. The poorest section of the city was the SE quarter. But, city residents were/are typically poorer than suburban residents. So, this economic stratification led to segregation, because African Americans were typically poorer, due to the same reasons that are true throughout the US.

[Nearwest]

JR_C: Thanks for the info. Sorry about misspelling the name of the city.


I watched a documentary on PBS in Chicago about Mayor Lighfoot. Included in it was an interview with her mother, Ann Lighfoot, who is about 90 yrs. old and still lives in Massillon. Mrs. Lightfoot stated that she and her husband decided against moving to SE part of Massillon, because they wanted in insure that their children would receive a good education.


Lori Lighfoot graduated from Washington HS in 1980.

[Westakron1]

Originally Posted by Nearwest

Hello, Ohio posters. l'm located in Chicago. Our new mayor, Lori Lighfoot, was born and reared in Masillon.


She made a reference to Masillon in her victory speech after winning the Chicago mayoral race in April. Lightfoot said that she grew up in a working family in a segregated steel town.


ls this still an accurate description of Masillon? l realize that Lightfoot hasn't lived there since she graduated from high school nearly 40 years ago.


Also, l'm aware that the steel industry in the US has been in decline since the 1970s and that many well-paying unionized jobs have been eliminated.

Having lived in the Chicago area I can tell you that Massillon is less segregated than Chicago. I would be interested to know what was the context for her using such language.

[eddie1261]

Originally Posted by Westakron1

Having lived in the Chicago area I can tell you that Massillon is less segregated than Chicago. I would be interested to know what was the context for her using such language.

Words like "segregation" and such are purely objective. When you go to public school, you go to school with who lives in your neighborhood. If your neighborhood is almost 100% black, you go to high school with the other black teens. That is far more driven by economics than choice. If you can afford he $250,000 house, go and live with the other people who can and send your kids to that school. Timken, now 2 companies, Timken Steel and Timken Corporation, still employs 75% of Canton. It is hard to find anybody in Canton who does not or did not work at Timken. Massillon is right next door. In fac you can live in Massillon and be closer to Timken than some of the Canton residents who work there.

What I find INSANE is that as hard as people like Dr King fought to integrate schools, James Meredith and such, look at what is happening now in colleges. Black students are demanding "No Whites" days, or the inverse, "Blacks Only" days.

Thus, the blacks are asking for a return to segregation. Amazingly sad.

[eddie1261]

Originally Posted by Nearwest

JR_C: I watched a documentary on PBS in Chicago about Mayor Lighfoot. Included in it was an interview with her mother, Ann Lighfoot, who is about 90 yrs. old and still lives in Massillon. Mrs. Lightfoot stated that she and her husband decided against moving to SE part of Massillon, because they wanted in insure that their children would receive a good education.

Also note this quote from Wikipedia.

Lightfoot was born in Massillon, Ohio, the youngest of four children. Her mother was a healthcare aide and school board member, and her father a factory worker and janitor. She grew up in a mostly white neighborhood on the west side of the city.

Mostly white neighborhood.

Also note that the quote from her mother infers that had the mayor's family lived in SE Massillon, that their children would not have received a good education. Isn't that statement saying that a predominately black high school does not offer the same education as predominately white schools?

Isn't education taught the same everywhere, the variable being the ability or desire of the students to absorb it? I seriously don't even know why this is a conversation anymore. Schools in Ohio were desegregated well before the mayor went to them if she graduated in 1980. Neighborhoods may not have been, but schools were. You went to school where you lived. Period.

[JR_C]

I did a little research, and it would seem that the Massillon schools could have been segregated through junior high school, even if coincidentally, due to economics. Massillon always had one high school. But, until 1980, Massillon had three junior high schools: Lorin Andrews on the SW side of the city, Longfellow on the NE side, and Jones on the SE side. In 1980, Jones was closed and sold.


Until this morning, I didn't even know Massillon used to have three JHS buildings. Of the three, only Jones is still standing. But, I've seen the other two plenty of times, before they were demolished, in 2006. (they were replaced by a single building as part of Ohio's school building frenzy in the 2000s and 2010s) I'm sharing images of each below. It seems obvious to me that Jones was the poorest of the three, even though it was only three years older than the other two.



Lorin Andrews:
https://images.app.goo.gl/prfn1tEJajfaPc3U8


Longfellow:
https://images.app.goo.gl/ESBvPso2p7ig3ZVcA


Jones: (street view from 2011)
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7803...7i13312!8i6656

[Solo44]

A bit late, I know, but I just stumbled across this thread today (March, 2020). Background: born and raised in Massillon, ancestors came from Scotland and England in the mid to late 1800s. lived in an old downtown neighborhood and graduated from Washington High School in Massillon in 1962, lived just north of town a total of 18 years after that. I knew every street and neighborhood in the city, and many black families, some with the Lightfoot name. I attended Lorin Andrews, Longfellow, Horace Mann, and Washington High School.



There's a lot of bogus information in the posts in this thread, but no point in going into that now. Some key points are worth mentioning, however. In the first half of the 20th century, Massillon was a bustling industrial town with a 1950 population of around 35,000. The workforce was primarily blue-collar, with the principal employers being steel mills at the southern edge of town and railroads in surrounding areas. The population was heavily immigrant - many Italians, Greeks and other Europeans, and a fair share of blacks. Neighborhoods were pretty much a mix of those origins, except for the far northeast section, where the successful business owners, attorneys, doctors lived. No blacks in that area, and no poor white people either.


I was in the poor white grouping, and I recall that we had different names to refer to the different nationality groups and blacks, and adults often had negative things to say about the various groups. In later years, I decided it satisfied a need they had to establish their place in the local society. I can say with certainty that racial segregation was NOT evident, and that became even more clear to me when I moved to the South in the early 1970s where I encountered my first "Whites Only" signs on drinking fountains, bathrooms, doctor's office entrances, etc. I was appalled at seeing these things in a large southern city, year's after the Civil Rights Act began to change things.


Anyone claiming that there was racial segregation in Massillon at that time is clearly doesn't understand the difference between segregation and prejudice. The schools were mixed race, and no one I ever met thought anything about that. But, racial prejudice certainly did exist, just as it did most places in the North. The N-word was routinely used to refer to Blacks, and as I recall, the black kids often called whites "Honkies". Having traveled extensively in the Midwest and East, I know that the prejudice we grew up with in Massillon was the same all over the northeastern part of the country.



To sum things up, I knew Massillon as a great place to grow up, even if you were poor. It wasn't better or worse than anywhere else in the area, but the idea that there was blatant racial segregation in the town is just wrong and anyone claiming otherwise should be challenged to show evidence of such.