In the early 1970s, Hillard “Com” Williams ran his W. Davis Street restaurant, Com’s, for nearly 30 years with his wife, Goldie. (Photo courtesy of Antiochiana, Antioch College)

Loss of industry, shift to tourism contributed to decline of once-thriving business district in Yellow Springs, locals say.

By Lauren Shows, Yellow Springs News

March 11, 2022

(Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the 2020–21 Guide to Yellow Springs: Downtown, Then and Now, and is being republished, with permission, in two parts.)

Black Americans have always faced barriers when it comes to opening and maintaining businesses. The blight of slavery, from the outset, barred enslaved Black Americans from property ownership for decades. When Black Americans were able to build communities in the years that followed, violence from whites could and did often destroy that growth.

June of 2020 marked the 99th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, when whites burned to the ground the thriving Black community of Greenwood, Oklahoma — known colloquially as “Black Wall Street” — and killed more than 100 Black residents in one of the worst incidences of racially motivated violence in American history.

Historically, Black Americans have also been denied loans for businesses from financial institutions — a practice that continues well into the 21st century. In a report that studied American small business loans between 2012 and 2017, the Federal Reserve concluded that small businesses owned by Black entrepreneurs were the least funded among those who had applied for loans during that time period.

Black businesses have also been the hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, with the National Bureau of Economic Research reporting in April that 41% of Black-owned businesses in the U.S. had been shuttered, compared to 17% of white-owned businesses.

Though Yellow Springs once had a higher than average incidence of Black-owned businesses for a community whose population was mostly white in the 1960s and ’70s, there has been a steady decline in Black-owned businesses since the 1980s.

SEE RELATED STORY: Reflections on Community Part I

This story relies mainly on memory — of those interviewed and those cited in YS News articles from the past — to construct a timeline of many of the village’s beloved Black-owned businesses.

Longtime resident Jocelyn Robinson said the declining diversity in the village’s businesses has been multi-faceted. The loss of industry in town, she said, contributed to the decline of not only Black businesses, but Black residents in general.

“The demise of Vernay, the college, the light technical and industrial base that the village had — all of those places had made commitments to employ a wide range of people,” she said.

Hershell Winburn has owned and operated Winburn Janitorial Service since 1981. (Photo from YS News archives)

Moreover, shifts in the country after desegregation played a part in the decline of Black-owned businesses — not just in Yellow Springs, but everywhere.

“There were Black entrepreneurs, and as desegregation continued, it diluted the stream of Black business people who had to be self-reliant and resilient,” she said. “And it took decades in some cases, but going into the ’80s, that change was solid.”

She also said that, historically, the realm of business wasn’t the only area affected by a decline in Black representation in the village.

“I think it’s misleading when you talk about Black businesses and downtown, because there were Black people of authority and responsibility in every aspect of life,” she said.

During her childhood in the 1960s, there were numerous examples of Black villagers in leadership positions, including Police Chief James McKee, Mayor James Lawson, Fire Chief Andy Benning and longtime school board member Paul Ford. Many of the teachers at the village’s public schools, she said, were Black.

She echoed a sentiment made by the late Phyllis Jackson in a 2010 YS News story, after reflecting on the same period of Black leadership in the village.

“You’d think this was a Black town,” Jackson said.

SEE RELATED STORY: Business Owner Spotlight: Jamie Sharp

Records of many of the village’s Black-owned businesses are preserved in “Blacks in Yellow Springs: A Community Encyclopedia,” which The 365 Project published in 2016. James McKee’s daughter, Karen McKee, was part of the committee that assembled the reference book, and said that community recollection was the primary source for its entries.

“We literally were operating off the memory of our elders — Phyllis Jackson, Paul Graham, Betty Ford, Isabel Newman — a long list of people who remembered the village in those days,” she said.

Jake and Maxine Jones operated several businesses in Yellow Springs, including Cassano’s Pizza franchise at the corner of Xenia Avenue and Corry Street. (Photo courtesy of Antiochiana, Antioch College)

As many of the village’s Black elders have passed on — Jackson and Newman died this year — Jalyn Roe said that the torch of memory is being passed to a younger generation of Black villagers, like herself, McKee and Robinson.

“I remember, there was a Black dentist in town named Dr. Pemberton, and he told my mom, ‘We’re the bumpers — we have to carry on to make sure the Black businesses and people stay, that they have us to bump up against,” Roe said. “Now we are those bumpers — we have to tell the stories.”

Robinson said that the village’s shift to a tourism-based economy over the years also contributed to the loss of Black businesses — the kinds of businesses that kept the village self-sufficient, and which were undercut by the growing world and the availability of those services outside of town.

“The only way we’re going to survive — politically, economically and in terms of public health — is to have small, self-reliant communities.” – Yellow Springs resident Karen McKee

The ongoing pandemic, however, has impressed upon her the ways in which a self-sustaining village, where villagers don’t have to travel and interact with the world at large for necessities, could be an answer to the problems the pandemic has created.

“The only way we’re going to survive — politically, economically and in terms of public health — is to have small, self-reliant communities,” she said.

McKee said that’s the kind of business district she remembers from her youth — and hopes the village can regain, with opportunities for Black business owners in the future.

“It was a thriving business district, and you didn’t have to go out of town to get the things you really needed,” McKee said. “We were a small town that supported one another.”