Coming Soon

Hidden History of Black Cincinnati reveals the untold stories that shaped a city and defined a people. 

Long before the Civil Rights Movement or the Harlem Renaissance, Black Cincinnatians were building communities, owning businesses, and resisting injustice in bold and brilliant ways. B.F. Howard and Pullman Porter Arthur J. Riggs co-founded the international organization now known as the Black Elks, and Margaret Garner’s tragic flight to freedom inspired Toni Morrison’s Beloved and ignited national debates on slavery. Celebrated painter Robert S. Duncanson rose to international acclaim in the nineteenth century despite the limitations of race.

Writer, historian, and cultural advocate Kareem A. Simpson unearths these powerful stories and more with clarity and care, offering a rich portrait of a city’s soul and the Black lives that shaped it.

Lovers of true crime and Ohio history will find themselves riveted by these crimes of passion.

There is a thin line between love and hate, and when intense passion threatens that border, blood will flow. Northern Ohio has had its share of people who felt that line snap. In Canton, the Phantom-Flapper Killer shot down her lover in cold blood after he threatened to expose her infidelity to the world. In Toledo, Dorothy Brown’s married boyfriend brutally attacked her when he learned that she was expecting. Max Amerman of Medina was willing to kill for the girl of his dreams, and when Cleveland’s Matilda Waldman believed that her husband was cursed by a witch, she took out the she-devil by way of a pistol.

Author Wendy Koile examines these relationships once bound by love, unraveled by lies, and cut off by murder.