Panel discussion touches on Black community's shared experiences growing up, moving to Elyria

Ahead of the Elyria Black Legacy Connection rolling out the rest of its interviews with residents, the group hosted a discussion Saturday evening at Second Baptist Church. A panel included several Elyria residents interviewed for the project's oral history series, and others touching on their experiences in the city's Black community, in local schools and beyond. Tara Conley, founder of Media Make Change and producer of the video interviews the group is set to release, hosted the panel discussion, with her mother, Brenda Arnold-Conley, as one of the speakers. Oliver Harris recalled growing up near the United Polish Club but never being allowed inside. Even as an adult, men he worked with who were not Polish, but were white, would go into the club without issues. He said it was one of the few times he saw racism in his neighborhood. Conley asked panelists Saturday — and it was a question during the video interviews — if they remembered nights of protests and unrest after the death of Daryl Maxwell, who was shot and killed by police in 1975. Arnold-Conley said a lot of what happened was on the west side, something she was isolated from not only in her neighborhood but by her family. "I could have done better," she said of the feeling she had that she had fled from a fight for what was right. In the years that followed, Arnold-Conley would become one of the first female linemen with the Elyria Telephone Company. "What I could have then, I got later," she said. "I was the first in everything and I made sure this community knew that. … This is my home, this is where I was born and raised. I am not going to take flight again." Jerry Williams disputed the characterization of riots at the time — as the portion of the west side most impacted was cordoned off by police. He said it was more of a "disagreement with the city." The discussion soon turned to experiences in school — with the classroom a place where many panelists first found themselves seen as "other" by their white peers, they said. Neighborhoods were integrated, but schools drew students from different sections of the city. And Black students who attended neighboring districts like Midview Schools made up an even smaller minority. Edith Lowery-Wilson said she was told taking college prep courses in high school were "not realistic" — her counselor suggesting home economics instead because "Black people can't go to college." Soon, Lowery-Wilson said her father was called into the school, but stood fast with his daughter, telling the counselor "If my little girl wants to go to college, I'm going to see to it that she goes to college — if we have to eat pinto beans and neck bones everyday." She credited in part her guidance counselor's resistance — as well as her church congregation's resistance that if she went to college "all she will do would have a lot of babies," she went on to get three degrees. Jack Marsh, another Elyria resident, said he received offers to play college football on scholarship, and the guidance counselor instead pointed him toward Central State or Wilburforce University "fine Negro colleges" — neither of which had offered him scholarships to attend. "We fought through all kinds of things we didn't know we were fighting," he said. City Councilman Brad Armstrong, I-5th Ward, remembered the only two Black teachers he had — in fifth and sixth grades. Growing up in the '80s and '90s, he said his generation was one that was going to stand up for what they knew was wrong. "We were just in a position we really couldn't do much about it because we had to get an education," he said. "I'm grateful to hear a lot of these stories. I want you to know, it doesn't stop, it just gets a little bit untaught — because that hate is taught." For Ethan West, founder of the Elyria Black Legacy Connection, it was an absence of Black history in textbooks and classes that helped drive him to found the group, and search for his own personal history in the process. "I've always been a history nerd, even as a child, but there was a big absence because I didn't see people that looked like me in these books. … I know we're accomplishing stuff, but we didn't see it in the text. So that's what kind of sparked me, as far as starting digging for Black folks and what did we accomplish." To see more of the Elyria Black Legacy Connection's interviews, and other items of Black history in the city, join its Facebook Group, Elyria Black Legacy Connection. This article has been corrected. Contact Carissa Woytach at (440) 329-7245 or cwoytach@chroniclet.com.