Racism Reversed

In the 1800s, Woodmere served as a stopping ground on the Underground Railroad. When slavery ended, its reputation as a place friendly to blacks remained, though that distinction didn't particularly thrill white neighbors. The simmering reached full boil in 1944, when black residents woke in the middle of the night to the scent of burning wood. They ran for their children, then stood outside to watch their homes burn.

Township trustees would eventually try less incendiary ways to force the mostly poor black population to leave. They prohibited the use of secondhand wood in constructing homes and forced owners to put up $1,000 bonds before work began. If residents couldn't or wouldn't comply, police allowed them to rethink their posture in jail.

It would take another 14 years before black residents finally had enough. In 1958, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled on their discrimination suit, declaring the housing codes illegal. The court decided that Woodmere should be able to establish its own ordinances. The village was now in charge of its own destiny.

Slowly, the town developed an identity of its own. The woodsy area attracted blacks leaving the city and whites looking for cheap homes. Yolanda Broadie's family was among them.

She remembers that day in the 1970s, her 11-year-old face pressed against the car window as her family headed east, past the huge trees that leaned like overprotective parents, the young saplings with branches as thin as a ballerina's arm. That's when she decided she hated the place. "I thought it was totally country."

Adjusting was hard. Her elementary school in Cleveland was all black. Now she was being bused to Orange, where she was the only black kid in class. The others viewed her curiously, as if she were a llama. "It was a culture shock for my brother and I," Broadie says. "It's a big shock to spend all your life around African Americans, then move to a community where you are actually the minority."

Broadie made the best of the situation, inviting classmates home for sleepovers and lavish southern dinners, trying to be everyone's favorite friend. But she lived a split life: the one at school, where integration was encouraged, and the one at home, where bitterness was sometimes nurtured.

At times she'd overhear her mother talking with friends about the racism they once faced — the inability to build homes on their own property, the way they were treated like field hands on a farm. Slowly, the town's history became intermingled with Broadie's. At school, she saw the belittling way whites treated her brother, who was neither as strong nor as outgoing as she was. She watched helplessly as he retreated into the solace of his own mind.

All of this left an impression on her. It also seemed to provide a guidepost. Thirty years later, she would be accused of doing the same discriminatory things to whites.

With just 850 residents tucked within an upscale shopping village, Woodmere is still governed like most small towns. The ladder-climbers occupying the higher rungs of politics don't bother with places like this. Here, government is left to those with a volunteer spirit, or at least free time on their hands.

The latter brought Broadie to the Woodmere City Council. An elder member died; she was appointed to replace him. Over the next few years, she became the queen bee of this group of leading citizens. She was intimidating, persuasive, sweet — the popular girl everyone follows. "People listened to her," says former member William Blakemore.

But neither she nor her colleagues were known for running the kind of sparkling city government suggested in civics classes. When state auditors examined the town's books in 1995, they were appalled. Contracts and bank statements hadn't been maintained. Planning and zoning commission members were paid for meetings they never attended. And no one was minding the cash register: The village general fund was handsomely overdrawn.

Its municipal court system wasn't much better. Filing "consisted of stapled pages and lacked pertinent information such as the ticket number, proceedings, payment amounts received," according to the audit.

Improvement was hard to find in subsequent years. Officials violated hiring laws, failing to publicly advertise positions and handing out jobs at whim. When lawyers subpoenaed records two years ago, they found that the person charged with overseeing equal-opportunity hiring had been dead for two years.