The Pride of Black Columbus

East High's athletic championships amidst a nation undergoing racial and societal upheaval is chronicled expertly in Will Haygood's book Tigerland 1968-1969: A City Divided, a Nation Torn Apart, and a Magical Season of Healing.

While East High's champion athletes are being remembered by Haygood's readers, an untold story is how the school that became the pride of black Columbus was also a hotbed for music and the arts. East High School boasts an array of graduates who became well-known musicians, actors and artists.

Haygood makes a compelling case that East High's context in both a physical and social space are critical to understanding how the inner-city school flourished athletically. East High's location along Broad Street, just a stone's throw from Franklin Park, placed it in the middle of the black East Side.

Not only did that ensure the school's population was all-black, but it placed the school near a bustling black-owned business district centered along Mt. Vernon Avenue. Forced together by segregation and redlining housing practices, a tight-knit community grew as neighborhood bonds tightened.

Amid the grocery stores, florists, and insurance agencies, a handful of nightclubs and jazz joints featuring live bands flourished on the Near East Side like the 502 Club, Club Regal and Club Cadillac. Those clubs served as the backbone of the musical culture on the East side, providing both an outlet and a paycheck for Columbus's black musicians.

That meant East High School students grew up with musical mentors in their neighborhoods and sometimes even in their immediate families. Such was the case with pianist Geoff Tyus and Bobby Alston, a third-generation trumpet player, both members of a legendary East High School jazz band in the early 1960s. The 1963 line-up featuring Alston, drummer Fred Thomas, trumpeter Lee Savoy, tenor saxophonist Nate Fitzgerald, and guitarist Craig McMullen was likely the finest ever seen in Central Ohio.

"That [jazz] band won the Ohio State Championship in 1963, and we traveled the state giving clinics and showing bands how we won," Alston recalled in a 2010 interview for Columbus musician Arnett Howard's blog. Alston left to tour with Gladys Knight and the Pips the summer after graduation while McMullen was Curtis Mayfield's guitarist in the early 1970s and Fitzgerald played sax with Frank Sinatra, the Temptations, B.B. King, and many others.

Guitarist Craig McMullen performs with Curtis Mayfield on a 1972 episode of Midnight Special

Segregation also meant that East High ended up with "the cream of the crop" in terms of black teachers because Columbus Public Schools administrators wouldn't send them to schools with whiter populations, Haygood explained on WOSU's All Sides with Ann Fisher on September 17. "There was a certain kind of passion with segregation because there was no other choice," Haygood said.

One of those East High teachers was Dr. Ted Turner, the first black Ohio State student to play in the school's Concert Band and Symphonic Orchestra in the mid 1940s. A trumpeter who often played with the Valley Dale Orchestra, Turner presided over those legendary East High jazz bands from 1959 to 1965.

Beyond the school's jazz band, the East High Marching Band has long been a point of pride for the community as they march before every home football game from the school to Harley Field, several blocks away. And soul music filled the lunchroom of East High in 1968-69 thanks to senior Mel Griffin, who had been making on-air public service announcements on WVKO radio. During that school year, Griffin was tapped by legendary East High School principal Jack Gibbs, the city's first black principal, to set up a makeshift radio studio inside the school and play 45s during lunch, according to Haygood's book.

"It was doubtful that an all-white administration would have allowed music to be piped in to the cafeteria, but this was Jack Gibbs's school and he believed—as his students did—that the music of Marvin Gaye, Nina Simone, Sly and the Family Stone, and others had a powerful relevancy to what was going on in America," Haygood writes.

Along with musicians, East High also produced a number of graduates who went on to become renowned actors including Bernie Casey, Phillip Michael Thomas, and Hal Williams. Casey was a longtime film actor with roles in dozens of films including Never Say Never Again, Cleopatra Jones, Brian's Song, Revenge of the Nerds and I'm Gonna Git You Sucka. Thomas teamed up with Don Johnson in the late 1980s on the top-rated TV show Miami Vice while Williams was the co-star as husband to Marla Gibbs on 227.

East High School was also the alma mater of Aminah Robinson, a MacArthur genius grant award winner whose colorful paintings often depicted her childhood memories growing up in an East Side housing project. And, long before East High became the focus of segregated black Columbus, writer and humorist James Thurber was an East High graduate.

Lead image: East High School alum Aminah Robinson during a talk with artist Mark Bradford at the Wex in 2010.