The Black press · papers of record for a community the dailies missed

1933 – TODAY

Read in the Recorder first: For its first decades of print, Black Fort Wayne was covered by a newspaper published ninety miles away. The Indianapolis Recorder, Indiana's great Black weekly, carried Fort Wayne's news through the 1930s and 1940s — Peggy Seigel's history of employment discrimination in this city is sourced in large part from its columns: the segregated Labor Day of 1933, the Bethune visit of 1940, the Fort Wayne NAACP's doings. The city's own venue survived in rarer artifacts: the Fort Wayne Weekly Carrier of 25 October 1947, the POTA newsletter produced by two Black members of the anti-expressway association.

The Observer, Coffee Break, Frost Illustrated, Ink: The Fort Wayne Observer, a weekly from the Observer Publishing Company, is the city's Black newspaper of record for the postwar decades; a front page that survives at the ACPL Genealogy Center — 1 January 1955 — declares it in its own masthead "Fort Wayne's Only Negro Newspaper," its headlines that day the NAACP's appeal to the president over terror in Mississippi and a local legislative amendment threatening Black education. In the 1960s Joe H. Andrews published the weekly Coffee Break, of which issues from 1968 and 1969 survive. In 1968 the publisher Edward N. Smith founded Frost Illustrated, subtitled "News & Views of African Americans," which ran forty-nine years as the city's oldest weekly and the principal chronicler of Black Fort Wayne until its final issue in October 2017. The weekly Ink followed from 2001 to 2009. And the line continues in the present tense: John Dortch published the first issue of the Fort Wayne Ink Spot on 12 March 2018, succeeding Frost Illustrated as the only Black-owned newspaper in northeast Indiana.

Sources:

1. Library of Congress newspaper directory data (chroniclingamerica.loc.gov), compiled in "List of African American newspapers in Indiana" — The Fort Wayne Observer (weekly, Observer Publishing Co.; LCCN sn90068952, catalogued from the 1900s with issues attested from 1955); Coffee Break (LCCN sn87056700; issues extant 1968–1969); Frost Illustrated (LCCN sn87055965); Ink (2001–2009); the Fort Wayne Weekly Carrier from Morgan, IMH 95.
2. Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center, "African American Genealogy at the Genealogy Center" — the Fort Wayne Observer front page of 1 January 1955 and its masthead claim.
3. Peggy Seigel, "Pushing the Color Line," IMH 104 (2008) — the Indianapolis Recorder's Fort Wayne coverage (issues of 1933, 1937, 1940 in her citations).
4. Journal Gazette (Peggy M. Sefton, 12 March 2018), Fort Wayne's NBC (2018), and the Library of Congress U.S. Newspaper Directory — the Fort Wayne Ink Spot, first issue 12 March 2018 under publisher John Dortch; Frost Illustrated founded 1968 by Edward N. Smith, final issue October 2017.