The Village of Alger in west central Ohio is small: Just about 800 people call the community home.
“We have nothing. We have nothing to hang our hat on,” said Village Administrator Paul Osborne. “We’re surrounded by what they call the muck around here.”
That muck was once good for onion farming, but these days, the village is gaining notoriety for something else.
“If you go on the Alger Wikipedia page, there's one notable resident — one! — and it's Ray Brown,” said David Strittmatter, a history professor at Ohio Northern University.
When he found out the baseball Hall-of-Famer hailed from a village so close to ONU, he got to work with local leaders and the county historical museum to recognize him. He and art professor Melissa Eddings-Mancuso even got a $110,000 grant from Forecast Public Art to do so.
They started fixing up Alger Village Park in Brown’s memory.
“A new outfield fence is going to be going up,” Strittmatter explained. “We also are building a terrace around this historical marker.”
But little did they know the controversy the idea would cause.
Pushback from village council
At first, the village council rallied behind the effort and unanimously passed a resolution to rename the park after Brown.
But in the weeks that followed, that decision didn’t sit well with everyone.
A resident started a petition not to rename the park. Opponents said they’d never heard of Ray Brown or that they could think of other people just as deserving of the honor. Village officials said some residents were resistant to change.
So at its next meeting, the village council flipped.
Councilwoman Linda Dienstberger supported both the original resolution and its reversal.
“I talked to the elderly people that lived in this town and I asked them what they thought about it,” she said. “And they thought, ‘Well, it's the Village of Alger Park,’ and I thought, ‘Well, the elderly people, they have a say.’”
Rick Onions, another council member, was appalled. He was one of two to vote against the reversal.
“I couldn’t hold it back anymore. I had to say that I felt like the outside world would look at us — no matter what the reason was that we were changing the name back to Alger Park — that they would look at us like we were the biggest racist community ever,” he said.
The aftermath
On platforms like Reddit and Facebook, allegations of racism abounded.
According to reporting from regional radio station WKTN, opponents firmly denied racist motivations. But Eddings-Mancuso from ONU, says it’s hard not to wonder about the pushback.
“The question that comes bubbling up in my mind is: if Ray Brown were white and as equally accomplished a baseball player, would the trajectory of his memorial be different in this area?” she said. “Would there have been something named after him earlier?”
"If Ray Brown were white and as equally accomplished a baseball player, would the trajectory of his memorial be different in this area?Melissa Eddings-Mancuso
Eventually, the village council reversed course again, this time passing an ordinance to permanently rename the green space, Ray Brown Memorial Park.
Longtime resident Jerry Cramer thinks that was the right thing to do. But he’s disappointed in the way the conversation devolved.
“In today's world, it seems like people can't have a dialogue without taking sides,” he said. “It just seems like, ‘You’re either on my side or I hate you,’ and that's crazy. That's crazy. We should be able to disagree without contempt or any ill feelings toward one another. That’s what this country was based on.”
Council members say, at this point, the controversy seems to have died down. The project is moving ahead, with a grand opening of the revamped park planned for next summer.
