Some Political Facts About Columbus You May Not Have Known

By Jonathan Beard

not stop south of the Mason-Dixon line -- but should include the specific and current reflections of Jim Crow here in Columbus, today.

larger pool of majority (typically White) voters. But not Columbus.

About a decade ago, the Columbus Community Relations Commission began sponsoring Heritage Tours for Columbus students to travel south to gain context and understanding about America’s racial history and civil rights. Over the past week, my Facebook and LinkedIn feeds were filled with pictures of young people at sites across the Deep South, learning our history. They traveled to places we’ve all heard of, and places not as well known, but critical for the fight for racial justice. It is undoubtedly a great experience for those students, and a great exposure to those great Americans and movements that opened America to its Black citizens.

It occurred to me that we should do a similar thing in Columbus— explore Columbus’s complicated racial history. The learning should

For instance, the year after Brown v. Board of Education desegregated America’s public schools, the Ohio General Assembly passed a law that for the first time allowed the boundaries of municipal school districts to vary from the city corporate limits – but only for the biggest Ohio cities (those with large Black populations). In Columbus, which was not landlocked by surrounding suburbs, this allowed for land to be annexed to Columbus, but remain in a suburban school district. And Columbus nearly doubled in size, while its school district boundaries remained the same: this so-called “win-win” policy continued the racial segregation of schools.

And when the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed, almost every big city that elected its council members in at-large (citywide) elections, rather than by geographically compact districts, moved to district elections under pressure from Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which says that geographically concentrated minority groups have a right to elect candidates of their own choosing, without having their votes diluted in a

Instead of allowing Black voters to elect candidates of their own choosing, since 1974 Columbus political leaders decided to select Black political leaders, in a “wink and a nod” to represent Black citizens. Most recently, every Black council member has been a city government employee prior to being nominated for council.

And in a November 2017 letter to the city council president, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund admonished that the current “fake districts” scheme is suspect because the “while this proposed voting structure may create the perception that voters will have a representative chosen by a neighborhood community, the maintenance of the underlying at-large voting scheme for all members of the city council will likely continue to unfailingly diminish the voices of Black voters in Columbus.” The majority Black council with a key vote by newcomer appointee Emmanuel Remy gave the council’s fake districts ballot issue its life.

Columbus is an interesting place to study race: let’s also teach our kids about the systems of racial oppression still going on here in Columbus.