The Truth Staff
Several dozen members and guests of the Toledo Study Hour group gathered at the Reynolds Corner Library on Saturday, February 22, for a sumptuous lunch preceded by a lesson during black History Month on an aspect of Black history that is not so well known.
Shirley Green, PhD, former Toledo police officer, the city’s first female police lieutenant, former City of Toledo Safety Director and, currently, an adjunct professor of history at Bowling Green State University, described for those gathered her personal journey in trying to shine a light on her family’s history – a history that also reflects that of a certain segment of the Black population. From that research came a book on her family’s history she published in late 2023 titled Revolutionary Blacks: Discovering the Frank Brothers, Freeborn Men of Color of Independence.
After her public service, a public service that began in 1976 when she joined the first sizeable wave of women entering the Toledo Police Department and ended as Safety Director in the Mayor Mike Ball administration, Green turned her attention to focusing on her family’s past.
While her father and his side of the family were longtime Toledo residents, her mother’s family hailed from New England and, as a child, during summer visits to Massachusetts and her grandfather’s home, she would notice the Canadian flag he displayed proudly. She would learn from him that he himself was Canadian – from Nova Scotia – as his family had been for many generations.
“We always thought that [grandpa’s] grandparents had gotten to Nova Scotia by way of the Underground Railroad,” Green told the Study Hour Club listeners.
Her faith in the accuracy of that story was shaken during her doctoral studies at Bowling Green State University when a professor informed her that Black folks had been in Canada, in Nova Scotia, for many years before the Underground Railroad hit gained steam and hit its peak during the mid-1800s.
Green would eventually ask the women on her mother’s side of the family how far back the family’s residency in Nova Scotia went. She could not get a clear idea from the women. They would often refer her to the men. Then she started on the men in the family, working her way up to the oldest of the group. From him, she learned that the family had indeed been in Nova Scotia for generations before the Civil War, courtesy of an ancestor who moved there in the late 1700’s with a surname of Frank.
Then Green’s research began in earnest. Census reports and military records uncovered two Frank brothers, William and his younger brother Ben, both free Black men, who enlisted in a Rhode Island army regiment at the onset of the Revolutionary War. William, she discovered, served for six years with honor and, after the war, returned to Rhode Island. Ben, on the other hand, served for three years … and deserted, joining the British forces and fleeing, along with thousands of other loyalists (among them about 3,000 Black soldiers serving in the British army) at the end of the war, to Canada.
A good deal of Green’s research involved uncovering why Ben had deserted and she found a host of reasons. The Rhode Island regiments would spend that brutal 1777-78 winter in Valley Forge, their ranks were depleted through battle and such difficult conditions and, as time went on, segregation of the Rhode Island regiments occurred and those in the regiment with men of color (Black, mulattos, Native Americans) were badly treated in so many ways
Green’s lengthy research – about 15 years in all – resulted in the published work, Revolutionary Blacks, that is now widely available including through Amazon and from the publisher, Westholme Publishing – www.westholmepublishing.com.
The Study Hour Club, now 92 years old, was formed in 1933 by 16 African American women who, at that time, had little access to more mainstream clubs or groups. The purpose was to focus on both education and socialization. They did so while meeting in each other’s homes and hosting local and visiting authors, such as Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps and Countee Cullen.
The Club’s motto remains “Strive for Excellence.”
