Political Quotes

“last week, Ohio and our Nation lost a champion for civil rights, Miss Elsie Steward Young of Highland County, a conservative, rural county in Southwest Ohio. Miss Elsie, as everyone called her, had just celebrated her 105th birthday. She is a legend in Southwest Ohio. Her courage, her leadership made a difference for children not only in her community but all over the country. In 1954, after the Supreme Court issued its landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision and ordered an end to segregation in American schools, the two all-White primary schools in Hillsboro--again, a small town, Highland County, southwest of Columbus--refused to integrate. The district continued to send Black students to a single all-Black school which was woefully underfunded. I remember the stories my mother would tell me of growing up in Mansfield, GA. She said she knew and she told me--when busing became such a controversy in the 1960s and 1970s, she told me that she knew all about busing. In the South, when she grew up in the twenties and thirties, they would bus Black students past the newer, better kept White schools to the segregated Black schools that were falling apart. No criticism of ``forced busing'' in those days. That was essentially what was going on in Hillsboro, OH, and Elsie Steward Young wouldn't stand for it. She and a group of mothers--this is in the 1950s--took matters into their own hands. They became the Marching Mothers of Hillsboro.…”