Lafcadio Hearn: The Journalist Who Crossed the Line

Lafcadio Hearn arrived in Cincinnati in eighteen sixty-nine, practically penniless, with poor eyesight, a Greek-Irish background, and no prospects. He had been raised partly in Greece, partly in Dublin, partly in Dublin's Anglo-Irish Protestant aristocracy, and none of it had prepared him for anything practical. He scraped by translating French literature and doing odd jobs, and he eventually talked his way into a position at the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer.

His journalism was peculiar, vivid, and graphic by the standards of the day. He wrote about murder scenes, about the slaughterhouses, about the lives of people who lived in the city's riverfront neighborhoods that respectable Cincinnati passed over. He was particularly drawn to the Black neighborhood along the waterfront called Bucktown, and he wrote about it with more curiosity and sympathy than almost any journalist of his era.

In June eighteen seventy-four, Hearn married Alethea Foley, a Black woman who had been born into slavery in Kentucky. The marriage violated Ohio's anti-miscegenation statute. The Enquirer fired him. He moved to the Cincinnati Commercial, where he continued reporting on Bucktown with the same attention he had brought before his marriage.

He stayed in Cincinnati until eighteen seventy-seven. He moved to New Orleans, then to Martinique, then eventually to Japan, where he became a Japanese citizen, married a Japanese woman, and spent the rest of his life writing about Japanese culture and folklore. He is better remembered in Japan and New Orleans than in Cincinnati.

His Cincinnati journalism is the best available record of what Black waterfront life looked like in the eighteen seventies, written by someone who paid attention, who married across the color line, and who was fired for it. The record exists because he looked. Most did not.