West Dayton, the Color Line, and the Nineteen Sixty-Six Uprising
Near Dayton, Ohio
By the mid-nineteen sixties, Dayton was one of the most racially segregated cities in the United States. About sixty thousand African Americans, representing nearly ninety-six percent of the city's Black population, lived on the west side, compressed into neighborhoods by decades of redlining, discriminatory lending, and restrictive covenants that prevented Black families from purchasing homes in white areas.
The west side was not a monolith. It contained thriving churches, businesses, civic organizations, and a branch of the NAACP founded in nineteen fifteen, one of the oldest in Ohio. It also contained concentrated poverty, inferior schools, and chronic unemployment enforced not by individual prejudice alone but by systematic policy.
W. S. McIntosh, a civil rights leader who had organized a Dayton branch of the Congress of Racial Equality, led one of the city's most visible early direct-action protests in nineteen sixty-three. For weeks, demonstrators stood outside the Rike Department Store in downtown Dayton, one of the city's most prominent retailers, to protest its refusal to hire Black workers in anything but custodial roles. The protest worked. Rike's changed its hiring practices.
The deeper grievances did not dissolve. On September first, nineteen sixty-six, a single evening of unrest on the west side brought the Ohio National Guard into Dayton. The riot lasted roughly twenty-four hours. Combined with ongoing NAACP legal campaigns and the federal Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty-four, the upheaval pushed the city toward grudging steps on housing and school desegregation. The walls did not fall overnight. But they moved.
