Black History in Fort Wayne

Black History · the first community of the city that followed the fort

Black Fort Wayne is not a chapter of the city's history; it is one of its founding threads. Black residents were present at the three rivers before the town was platted — as enslaved people, servants, soldiers and laborers at the American forts — and the free Black families who settled in the Hanna Addition in the 1830s and 1840s founded, in 1849, the congregation that still worships as Turner Chapel A.M.E. What followed was a history of building under pressure: a community the state's 1851 constitution tried to bar at the border, counted in every census from 1850 forward, kept small by design for a century, and then — in a single generation after 1940 — grown into one of the city's largest peoples through two fights the record documents in unusual detail, for factory jobs and for housing. This section holds that whole arc: the churches and the center, the ball club and the barbershops, the redlined maps and the referendum that saved a neighborhood by defeating an expressway, the school boycott and the firsts that followed it, down to the museum that preserves the record and the mayor who now holds the city's first office. The scholarship underneath it is unusually strong for a city of Fort Wayne's size — Iwan W. Morgan's and Peggy Seigel's studies in the Indiana Magazine of History, the History Center's timeline work, and the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center's Marsha Smiley Collection of Black pioneer profiles — and where those sources disagree, the disagreement is printed.