The Color Line in Ohio: A History of Race Prejudice in a Typical Northern State

From the library of Erick E. Kolthoff, a student at Wilberforce University in Ohio during the 1930s. Wilberforce was one of three universities for Black students established before the Civil War and was the alma mater of W.E.B. Du Bois. In 1932 Kolthoff wrote a letter on behalf of his student union to the N.A.A.C.P. magazine The Crisis, asking that Du Bois desist from his editorial attacks on Wilberforce:

I have been severely criticised by many Wilberforce sympathizers in the neighboring towns for continuing to sell this magazine....As I have suggested in your Crisis Agents Bulletin, if this attitude is changed and a friendly and interested attitude is assumed toward Wilberforce -- much will have been done to redress the so call [sic] wounds which have been inflicted on Wilberforce in the past and the desire of Wilberforcians and their sympathizers, all over the country, to support the magazine and cooperate with the N.A.A.C.P., will have been stimulated.

It was a touchy subject. Wilberforce had been burned to the ground in 1876 by White locals angry that "the only colored institution of any pretensions in the State" was drawing Black people into the area, an incident mentioned in this book. DuBois wrote in The Crisis that Wilberforce was really two interlocked institutions, one owned by the Church and one by the State, and that the new President needed to combine the two institutions into one and sever it from "the dead hand of church control and from petty State politics which are today strangling it to death."

In the end, the state-funded division of the school broke off to become Central State University. Du Bois resigned as editor of The Crisis in 1934, and readers were spared further attacks by Wilberforce's most famous alumnus. Kolthoff remained in Ohio after graduating, working as a teacher and in the aviation industry. He served in the Army for three years during World War II and eventually returned to his native Puerto Rico, where the name Kolthoff has some distinction: Erick E. Kolthoff-Benners was the first Afro-Puerto Rican member of the Puerto Rico judiciary, and his son Erick Kolthoff-Caraballo is an associate justice of the Supreme Court.