The Nonwhite Working Class
YOUNGSTOWN, OhioIn 1984, Lewis Macklin stood up at a community meeting and argued that city officials should shut down his high school. It had been seven years since Black Mondaywhen Youngstown Sheet & Tube announced it was closing its largest factory, costing 5,000 people their jobs and setting off a chain of plant shutdowns that sent the citys population into free fall. Youngstown could no longer fill its schools, so one would have to close.
But the city did not want to shut down Macklins school, Wilson High, which was mostly white. Officials wanted to close the nearby black school instead. Macklin, who is black, recently told me the citys argument was, Keep Wilson openif you close it down, the white community will move. Well take our children and well move. That argument won. The city shut down the black school, South High, in 1993, and its students were sent to the districts remaining schools. White families continued to flee the south side anyway, and by 2016, students in the Youngstown School District were 15 percent white and 64 percent black.
Like many buildings in Youngstown, South High School stands abandoneda stately, stone Beaux-Arts building whose afterlife as a charter school never stuck. The hedges are trimmed, but the flagpole is bare. For Macklin, now a reverend at a nearby Baptist church, the building is a reminder of how deindustrialization, and the response to it, hurt not just the city of Youngstown, but the citys black community in particular.
If youve heard about Youngstown lately, it is probably because the city has been held upover, and over, and over againas the locus of white working-class drift from the Democratic Party to Donald Trump. The epicenter of the Trump phenomenon, the public policy theorist Justin Gest called the city. It was here, the story goes, that Trump stoked white anxiety, pitched cures to roiling crowds, and brought white union workers into the GOPs column for the first time in decades, where they appear to be staying put. Democrats underperformed in the region during the blue wave in 2018, and Youngstown will be represented by a Republican in the Ohio state Senate for the first time in 60 years.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/06/black-voters-youngstown-ohio-trump-democrats.html