Last November, the University of Cincinnati Libraries announced the award of an Archives Grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to the Libraries’ Archives and Rare Books Library (ARB). This grant supports the archival processing of records related to the lawsuit Bronson v. Board of Education of the City School District of the City of Cincinnati maintained by the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and donated to the University of Cincinnati in the 1980s.
All achievements and accomplishments of the witnesses listed are current as of 1979, the year that the witnesses began giving depositions.
Theodore Berry (1905-2000)
Theodore Berry was a civil rights attorney, the first African American mayor of Cincinnati, the first African American assistant prosecutor of Hamilton County, Cincinnati city councilman and two-time president of the Cincinnati NAACP. Berry attended Cincinnati Public Schools as a student and graduated from the University of Cincinnati College of Law in 1931. His civil rights activism included fair employment, housing and desegregation of schools. His deposition in the Bronson case focused on his knowledge of segregation within the schools and fair housing/housing relocation regarding the assignment of schools.
Gordon Foster (1918-2011)
Gordon Foster was a scholar, professor and director of University of Miami’s School Desegregation Consulting Center. Foster was a Cincinnati native and attended Oberlin College and Ohio State University. He held a doctoral degree in educational administration and published dozens of articles and school studies on desegregation. Foster testified as an expert witness in 17 federal desegregation cases around the country. His deposition in the Bronson case consisted of faculty and administrative assignments and employment in both the suburban school districts and Cincinnati, student enrollment, attendance boundary changes in Cincinnati up to 1963 and the history of Cincinnati school segregation.
Robert L. Green (1933- )
Robert L. Green is a former dean of the College of Urban Development at Michigan State University, scholar and civil rights activist. Green graduated from Michigan State University with a doctorate in educational psychology. He has served on various boards and committees on the state and federal level, including the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Social Change Board of Directors. He has been an expert witness in over 12 federal school desegregation cases and author of numerous books, articles and reviews on the topic. His deposition centered on the relationship between student achievement, student behavior, student assignment and student transfers because of racial discrimination and segregation.
William Lamson (1941-1992)
William Lamson was a demographic analyst and expert witness for the NAACP in over 15 federal desegregation cases. Lamson served as a consultant for the United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare; United States Office of Civil Rights; and numerous state school boards. For the NAACP litigation office, he took school data and drew out maps for the Cincinnati and suburban school districts’ school attendance boundaries, transportation visuals in overcrowded schools and the location of portables and rooms rented to the school board for schools with overcrowding. His deposition was spread over the span of 16 days and his extensive transcripts make up 15 volumes.
Martin E. Sloane (1928-2014)
Martin E. Sloane was a civil rights attorney and scholar. Sloan was a graduate of Columbia University Law School and at the time of the case was with the General Counsel of the National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing since 1973. He was also employed with the United States Commission on Civil Rights and the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. He wrote articles for various law and civil rights journals. He testified in many different federal cases regarding housing and was tasked with discussing federal housing policies for the Bronson case.
Marian Spencer (1920-2019)
Marian Spencer was a Cincinnati civil rights advocate, the first woman to serve as chapter president of the NAACP of Cincinnati and the first African American woman elected to the Cincinnati City Council. Spencer was very involved with the local schools as she chaired the NAACP of Cincinnati Education Committee for over two decades. Alongside the NAACP, she assisted the plaintiffs in filing the lawsuit. Her deposition in the case focused on her involvement with the plaintiffs and her experiences with the education committee. At the conclusion of the case, she was selected to serve on the Community Wide Task Force through the Cincinnati Board of Education to ensure the settlement terms were being met.
Karl E. Taeuber (1933- )
Karl E. Taeuber is a professional sociologist who holds a doctoral degree in sociology from Yale University. At the time of the Bronson case, Taeuber was the assistant director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin. He has been a consultant for the Bureau of the Census, the National Academy of Sciences and the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He testified before the United States Senate Select Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity and for many desegregation cases. He has published extensively on population migration, school segregation and housing. His deposition in Bronson referenced housing, census/population changes and his Taeuber Index of Dissimilarity, which measures the reduction of racial isolation by comparing the racial composition within a school to the district.
These were just of the few individuals who assisted the NAACP and Bronson plaintiffs during the many years of the court case.
This project has been made possible in part by grant RH-104772-24 from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC). Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this blog post do not necessarily represent those of the NHPRC.
