News Release

Play Depicts One Ohio Community's Struggle to End Segregation

Date: March 16, 2011

Date: March 16, 2011

On March 6, approximately sixty people filled the auditorium at Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site for the staging of a dramatic play entitled The Hillsboro Story. At the conclusion of the 90-minute play, the cast and playwright facilitated a 45-minute talkback session, allowing audience members to ask questions about The Hillsboro Story and share their own thoughts on race, education, and history in their own lives and communities.

The play opens in Hillsboro, Ohio on July 5, 1954 when the small town's segregated all-black elementary school erupts in flames. Despite an 1887 law outlawing segregated education in the state of Ohio, the Hillsboro school board created a segregated system in 1939 when it transferred all African American students from the integrated Webster Elementary School to the predominantly black Lincoln Elementary School.

When the U.S. Supreme Court struck down segregated public schools in Brown v. Board of Education, parents in Hillsboro assumed that children would be able to attend the school closest to their home. When the school board failed to integrate, local resident Philip Partridge set fire to the all-black Lincoln School in an attempt to hasten the process. The continued delays on the part of the school board and the conviction and imprisonment of Partridge sparked a two-year struggle that saw the organization of the Marching Mothers, peaceful demonstrations, and the creation of home and church schooling program for African American children. In 1956, the courts decreed in Clemons v. Hillsboro Board of Education that any child not in public school be granted immediate admittance on a non-segregated basis.

Playwright Susan Banyas was a third grader in Hillsboro and remembers these actions literally taking place outside her classroom window. Most of the text for The Hillsboro Story was developed from more than 50 interviews conducted in the last six years with the primary participants in the event, their families and friends, and from national voices representing the civil rights movement. The dramatic recreation of this piece of Ohio history powerfully illustrates both the local and national impacts of the Brown decision.

The lively talkback session took a dramatic turn even for the cast and playwright, when they learned that sitting in the front row were Leola Brown Montgomery and Linda Brown Thompson, the wife and daughter of the case's namesake, Oliver Brown. The Hillsboro Story continued on a Midwestern tour, which included stops at Hillsboro Middle and High Schools and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio.