YELLOW SPRINGS, Ohio — Few families get the privilege to know their great-grandparents and even fewer will get to retrace their steps.

What You Need To Know

  • This Yellow Springs family can trace their history back to 1881 in the same family home

  • Eight generations have left their mark on the city, many fighting for inclusion and equality

  • Roe is the sixth generation, working to keep businesses and communities inclusive and diverse 

For Jalyn Roe's family, though, it's a tradition and history that is best taught from their front porch.

“This is my great-grandfather, Fielding Dunbar,” she said.

Roe and her mother put together board after board depicting more than 140 years of family history in Yellow Springs, through eight generations, all of whom have called the Ohio village home.

“Yellow Springs was a place even then that really embraced inclusion,” she said.

In 1881, Fielding Dunbar and his father, H. Dunbar, moved to the village.

At the time, they were just 12 years removed from slavery.

Fielding became one of the first Black property owners in Yellow Springs.

Now that house belongs to her.

"My grandmother taught him how to write cause all of his property he would sign with an X," Roe said.

Roe said Yellow Springs has been far from perfect through the years.

Her mother attended a segregated primary school, she wasn't allowed to be a cheerleader for her home team in high school and when she and her husband tried to start a business, they were told their skin color would make that impossible.

“So they got married in business suits to visualize what they wanted to do," she said.

It worked.

Roe said around the time she was born her parents were franchisees of a local pizza restaurant, two of the earliest Black business owners in Yellow Springs.

"Now I visualize all the time,” she said.

Growing up, Roe said she saw Yellow Springs embrace diversity in real-time. They knew many Black business owners, teachers, and even the police chief was Black.

"When I was going to school the community was 33-34% African American,” she said.

Roe said she grew up in a Yellow Springs that encouraged neighbors to sit on the porch and get to know each other, a Yellow Springs that didn't shy away from difficult conversations and issues, a Yellow Springs that openly discussed inclusion.

She left in her 20s to travel and work outside Yellow Springs, returning in the 90s to a very different-looking community.

“We still spoke diversity and the importance of it, but the percentage of Yellow Springs is now only 13%, she said.

Roe's current job looks to reverse that trend, not just in Yellow Springs but in communities around the country.

She's the senior consultant and founding partner of Jael Group, a firm working to help businesses ensure there's space for diverse voices and employees in the workplace and communities where they operate.

“That's how you make change," she said. "It’s not until you really start to put those systems in place and those policies and programs in place to back up what it is that you’re saying."

Roe said it's one of the reasons she brought the company back to Yellow Springs where she and her entire family learned to love their roots.

Roe is the sixth generation to live here.

Her children, who have moved out to have children of their own, were the seventh.

She hopes in a few years, they'll come back and reclaim the home and community the family has built for generations, ensuring the Dunbar descendants continue to leave their mark on Yellow Springs for generations to come.