The distance to Brownstone, an elegant restaurant and high-tech meeting place
in downtown Columbus owned by a group of young African American entrepreneurs,
can be measured by the struggles of people like William M. Potter and
Zylpha Garrett to break the economic lock-out that doomed such efforts
by black business aspirants of an earlier day.
Listening to Potter, now 80, who was one of hundreds of people who
turned out at the King Arts Complex in Columbus to meet the Voices
of Civil Rights tour, it strikes me, as the bus wends its way north
through the heartland of America, that in the days before the Civil
Rights Movement the demarcation of the Mason-Dixon Line was a geographic
distinction that hardly mattered if you were African American.
Wounded in battle as a staff sergeant with General Patton in Europe
during World War II, Potter returned to a post-war America determined
not to accept the kind of segregation he had known growing up in the
foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in Manchester, Kentucky.
A northern city like Columbus had little of the overt signs of the “Jim
Crow” South when Potter moved there in 1951 to take a job after
earning a college degree. But in practice the city’s housing
was, if anything, more restrictive than what he had known in Kentucky,
he recalled.
“Columbus at that time was very segregated,” said Potter. “There
were certain areas of the city designated for what they called ‘colored
neighborhoods.’ You could not find decent housing outside of
those neighborhoods. And as a result of the limitations, the neighborhoods
were overcrowded.”
Potter’s own family shared an eight-room house in East Columbus
with three other black families.
As the Civil Rights Movement rolled across the South, Potter and
his fellow veterans discussed how best to become involved. For combat
veterans, reacting passively to violence wasn’t their way.
“We couldn’t sit still and not do something,” Potter
says. “We looked around and said ‘We’re going to
desegregate the city of Columbus.’ And we started to look for
ways to do that.”
To counter the reluctance of white-owned banks to offer home and
business loans to black applicants, the group formed a lending institution,
the Beneficial Acceptance Corporation, on November 2, 1959. When no
broker would sell Beneficial on the stock exchange, the group raised
its first $200,000 to qualify as a lender by selling stock in Columbus’s
black churches, at $10 a share.
Beneficial began to make loans to eager black home buyers in Columbus
and would go on to become one of the first 14 black mortgage banks
in America established as lenders, United Mortgage Banks of America-UMBA. “Chicago,
St. Louis, Detroit, they had the same problems,” said Potter. “Once
we got strong enough, we began to get competition from white lenders.”
In the 1950s, when banks wouldn’t loan Zylpha Garrett and her
husband William the money needed to complete work on turning St. Clair
Hospital into an upscale hotel for black travelers shunned by white-owned
inns, the couple turned to black businessman Lyman Kilgour, owner of
the B&T Metal Co., for a $25,000 loan.
Kilgour had amassed his capital, recalled Mrs. Garrett, who turned
95 in July, by hiring a white man to pose as the boss of B&T Metal. “That’s
part of civil rights,” she said. “You have no idea how
hard it was to get financing. You had to find ways of getting around
it. Sometimes some of the things make you weep.”
In its heyday, the St. Clair attracted the likes of Duke Ellington
and Lionel Hampton and enjoyed unparalleled success until the 1964
Civil Rights Act opened up public accommodations to all.
After the building sat vacant for 20 years, Garrett sold it to a
developer, who turned it into a home for senior citizens.
As our bus crew enjoyed a goodbye dinner for one of our departing
riders at Brownstone that evening and took a tour of its state-of-the
art facilities, I thought the spirit of free enterprise for all secured
by Columbus’s civil rights pioneers was alive and well, and stylish.
