September 1988: Two youngsters peer into DeWine Pond, which abuts Y.S.-Fairfield Road. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, George and Richard DeWine housed a small collection of animals — swans, peacocks, deer and a llama — at the pond for public viewing. It was a favorite spot for winter ice skating for the community into the ‘80s. (YS News archives)
The Spring(s) | DeWine’s perspective
- Published: April 27, 2025
By Cyraina Johnson-Roullier
It’s been a while since I last engaged with you, but as I’ve been navigating this unexpected hiatus, I’ve been paying attention to significant issues of potential interest to us, one of which has been unfolding just eight miles away. This is the particular circumstance of the Haitian immigrants still living in Springfield, Ohio. With the Monday, March 31, 2025, ruling of a California federal judge delaying the removal of Temporary Protected Status for approximately 350,000 Venezuelans, the same may yet happen for the roughly 500,000 Haitians — including those living in Springfield — who have been added to the case, on which the judge has not yet ruled.
Haitians have continued to be targeted in the U.S., now in a much more serious way than something like last year’s outlandish accusation, made during the 2024 election campaign, that law-abiding Haitians living legally in Springfield were eating people’s pets. Springfield’s Haitians have been living legally in the United States under the same Temporary Protected Status designation as have Venezuelans. While TPS doesn’t provide a pathway to citizenship, it can be renewed if, after review, certain conditions concerning natural disaster or violence are met. But as was announced last month by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, TPS has been rescinded for all Haitians, who were given a new deadline of Aug. 3, 2025, by which time they will need to have left the United States. Though this action builds on President Trump’s debunked accusations from last year, it also makes one of his 2024 presidential campaign promises a grim reality — that if reelected, he would revoke the TPS that legalized these immigrants.
However, and as many have noted since that campaign promise, this issue is not just about immigration, but about community, and just how much these immigrants have brought to that of Springfield. But amid the flurry of incendiary responses to President Trump’s false allegations last year, one voice rose above the noise to plead the immigrants’ case: that of Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who tried, in a New York Times guest essay, to bring a calm, steadying and above all, human, voice to the issue, one solidly based in reality. Speaking to a part of that essay’s title, “Here is the Truth About Springfield,” Gov. DeWine revealed that though he was born in Springfield, he and his wife, Fran, “have lived our entire lives in Yellow Springs.” Yet in focusing on the Springfield he has known all his life, it’s actually what Gov. DeWine didn’t say about Yellow Springs, which is where he actually grew up, that more explicitly brings home the point he sought to make about Springfield: that it is community itself — not whether or not some of those who make up that community are immigrants, or Haitian, or anything else — that is most important.
Growing up as I did just down the street from Gov. DeWine’s family home, I share with him (as well as many of you) the very special experience of community that comes from having spent my formative years in the village. Though Yellow Springs is a much smaller community than Springfield, the village as I knew it in the ’70s and ’80s was extremely tight-knit, with a very strong culture of shared values stretching across multiple generations, religions, nationalities, races, classes, languages and every other kind of difference anyone could imagine.
At that time, DeWine’s Pond, on the grounds of Gov. DeWine’s family home, was a community magnet — everyone, no matter our many differences, was welcomed there, to skate together on the winter ice, or to visit the ducks, swans and geese who made it their home in warmer months. On scorching Ohio summer days, I often rode my bicycle down the long drive through the grounds to the home itself, to ask Mrs. DeWine — Gov. DeWine’s mother — for permission to climb the fence in order to approach those ducks, swans and geese, and she would always kindly reply, “Yes, certainly, but don’t go too close to the water!” I learned there that a duck is afraid of you, but that a swan is beautiful yet mean, and will bite if you get too close. Of such community magnets, we shared many, some of which still exist — there was a weekly community folk dance on Friday nights, featuring dances from cultures everywhere in the world, which all could learn and dance together with others; Glen Helen; John Bryan State Park; Gaunt Park and its Fourth of July celebration in addition to the community swimming pool in summer and long, cold days sledding down its hill in winter; the Street Fair; and of course the Yellow Spring.
And there was also always Antioch College, a major proponent of civil rights activity during the 1960s, as well as the alma mater of Coretta Scott King, later wife of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Through the influence of Antioch, coupled with the commitment on the part of many of the citizens of Yellow Springs who championed the values of social justice and equality, fidelity to the idea of community has remained paramount — most importantly through the effort to build and maintain a community bound by inclusivity, where cultural, national, racial and other differences are not feared but embraced, and where these American values are meant to be celebrated by and for all.
The Yellow Springs I knew as a child may not now be exactly the same, but these values are nevertheless both its bedrock, and its legacy. Even if changed from what I experienced long ago, as a result of this essential foundation I can still find it there, as even in this new iteration it yet exists in stark contrast to the world outside its bounds, where I now live. Because of this contrast between my long history with the village and the experience of living outside it, I can say that I have never felt set apart from the community due to my African American heritage, nor that my existence aroused fear or distrust in anyone, as I have too often felt in the world outside village bounds. In the new national political framework in which we now live, the idea of community, as well as who belongs to it and who doesn’t, has taken on more narrow signification. Yet it is, nevertheless, a commitment to the kind of community that is Yellow Springs that enlivens Gov. DeWine’s words on Haitian immigrants, and that calls now to us all.
*Cyraina Johnson-Roullier is an associate professor of modern literature and literature of the Americas at the University of Notre Dame.
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