Willie D. Thompson was about 6 years old in 1946 when her family arrived in Lima from the small town of Cruger in the heart of Mississippi to join her grandfather, who, disenchanted with life as a sharecropper in the South, had come north to work at Ohio Steel.
In September 1989, 43 years after she stepped off a train amid the noise and steam of locomotives in south Lima, Thompson sat down with historian and folklorist Hans Houshower to talk about her early childhood in rural Mississippi and growing up on 11th Street in Perry Township.
Among the fragmented memories of her early life in Mississippi, Thompson recalled “having sugar cane in our backyard,” the hogs her family raised and a goat that chased her. She remembered that children went to work young.
“I wasn’t old enough to pick cotton, but had we stayed until I was old enough I probably would have had to,” she said.
She didn’t because, in the fall of 1946, her family headed to Lima.
“I think it was October or November,” Thompson said in the 1989 interview, “because school had already started, and we got here on a Tuesday or Wednesday, and I thought I would get out of school until that Monday. We got here in early afternoon, and my parents made me go to school the next day. I remember that vividly because I was so upset that they wouldn’t let me wait until the next week to go to school.”
Thompson would wait for very little during her life. She worked, volunteered, tutored, mentored, taught and studied, particularly Black history. In February 1983, she presented a paper on Lima’s Black history at the Allen County Museum. In 1988, Thompson founded the Northwest Perry Township revitalization group because, in the words of The Lima News, “she didn’t like what she saw outside her window.”
That window was in Thompson’s home on East 11th Street, near Central Avenue. Thompson lived much of her life near that intersection, since the day her newly arrived family moved in with her grandfather in a house he had built.
Life in that part of Perry Township was hardscrabble.
“There weren’t very many houses,” Thompson told Houshower. “We had to carry water … and I remember carrying water from a pump across the way,” she added, noting they also had to wash clothes by hand. “They had a tub and washboard, and some of our neighbors even had big pots where they would boil the clothes, the white clothes.”
While her father, Willie Johnson, joined her grandfather at Ohio Steel, Thompson’s mother, Roberta Streeter Johnson, worked at Jack’s Cafeteria in the 100 block of West High Street when her health permitted. Thompson, at the time an only child, attended elementary and junior high school at Perry before going to Shawnee for high school because Perry did not have a high school.
As a young girl, with her mother often sick in the Ottawa Valley tuberculosis hospital and her father working long hours at Ohio Steel and later at the General Motors foundry in Defiance, Thompson took care of herself and her brother.
After high school, Thompson told Houshower, she “started out working sporadic jobs,” beginning with a part-time job at Marshall’s Restaurant at High and Union streets, followed by a full-time job at the Leader Store downtown pressing clothes in the alterations department, and then her first “really full-time” job in the kitchen at Lima Memorial Hospital.
Thompson also took a secretarial course but couldn’t find a job in her field because, she told Houshower, “They just didn’t hire Black people for those jobs. They didn’t care how fast I could type or take shorthand, so I went back to the hospital.”
Eventually she found a job at Blue Cross through an employment agency and then, through another employment agency, found a secretarial job at Superior Coach. Through a program at Superior Coach, later known as Sheller-Globe, she was able to earn an associate degree in business administration from Northwestern Business College.
After Sheller-Globe closed in 1981, Thompson went to work part-time at Westinghouse before finally going to work for the Ohio Department of Transportation, where she eventually was promoted to equal employment opportunity officer.
In the meantime, Thompson had been researching the history of Blacks in Lima.
“Traditionally, achievements by Blacks have been omitted from local and national histories,” The Lima News wrote in February 1983. “Miss Thompson wants to reweave the fabric of Lima’s history to remind us that Blacks achieved distinction. Piecing together information on the community has not been an easy task. Miss Thompson has gleaned bits of information from census records, phone books and interviews with residents.”
The result of that research was a lecture on Lima’s Black history, which Thompson presented at the Allen County Museum in February 1983.
“We are not trying to lay a foundation for the participation of Black people in the life of this community – this country,” Thompson said. “There is a foundation. Black people have helped to shape the history of Lima, America and the world, and we are a vital part of its future.”
Thompson found inspiration for another passion while looking out the window of her house on 11th Street in the late 1980s.
“One day at lunch, I watched a man in a pickup truck drive past with a load of junk. A bit later, he drove past again empty,” Thompson told The Lima News in October 2010.
“People were using her neighborhood as a junk yard, illegally dumping, and she wanted it stopped,” The Lima News wrote. “A group of neighbors formed and with enforcement and some other activity, improved the situation and cleaned up what was being left.”
That group of angry neighbors became the Northwest Perry Township Revitalization Group. They cleaned up empty lots in the area and lobbied township and county officials to ensure the illegal dumping was curtailed. They went further, pushing for streetlights, getting abandoned houses demolished and generally pushing to make life better in that part of Perry Township. Thompson served as the group’s president from its founding until 2009.
In early September 2021, a group gathered at the corner of Reese Avenue and 15th Street to dedicate the new Willie Thompson Park. Five months earlier, on April 10, 2021, Thompson had died at the age of 80 in Lima Memorial Health System.
Among the long list of accomplishments, Thompson was a tutor for the Literacy Council of Northwest Ohio, a mentor for the Lima schools and alternative schools, a member of the Council of Neighborhood Groups, a member of the Fair Housing Board, a member of the Regional Planning Committee, and a member of the Lima Buckeye Chapter of the American Business Women’s Association. A recipient of the Allen County Good Neighbor Award, she also received the Neighborhood Enrichment Award and the JCPenney Award. In her honor, June 21, 2020, her 80th birthday, was declared Willie Thompson Day in Lima.
SOURCE
This feature is a cooperative effort between the newspaper and the Allen County Museum and Historical Society.
LEARN MORE
See past Reminisce stories at limaohio.com/tag/reminisce
Reach Greg Hoersten at [email protected].
