The count · Black Fort Wayne in the censuses

1850 – 2020

Small for a century, then transformed: The full decennial table — city and county, with the annexation warnings the jumps require — is in the Population section; this entry carries the Black series itself, because its shape is the community's biography. In 1850 the census found 81 free Black residents in the city and 102 in the county. Exclusion cut the county's count by 35 percent by 1860 and to under fifty by 1870. The recovery was slow: the Thirteenth Census of 1910 recorded 572 Black residents in the city, 0.9 percent of the whole. The First World War's labor demand moved the line for the first time — 1,454 in 1920 and an estimated 2,200 within two years — before the reversal of the 1920s held the community near 2,300 in 1930, scarcely two percent of the city. The transformation the Great Migration made elsewhere came to Fort Wayne with the Second World War: 2,517 in 1940 (2.1 percent), 5,294 in 1950, 11,645 in 1960 (7.2 percent), 18,921 in 1970 (10.6 percent). In the three most recent censuses the Black population, counted as Black alone and non-Hispanic, stood at 35,391 in 2000, 38,514 in 2010 and 39,560 in 2020 — growing at every count, its share easing from 17.2 to 15.0 percent only because annexation and faster-growing communities changed the denominator around it. Read whole: a small, old, persistently counted community for the city's first century; one of its largest peoples in its second.

Sources:

1. U.S. Census of 1850 (81 city / 102 county), via Poinsatte, as cited in Seigel, IMH XCVII (2001); Indiana Historical Society, "Early Black Settlements by County" (the 1860 and 1870 county figures).
2. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census (1910) — 572 Black residents in Fort Wayne, as reprinted in Griswold and Phelps (1913); Iwan W. Morgan, "Latecomers to the Industrial City," Indiana Magazine of History 95 (March 1999) — 1,454 in 1920, an estimated 2,200 by 1922, and the series 2,517 (1940), 5,294 (1950), 11,645 (1960), 18,921 (1970).
3. Peggy Seigel, "Pushing the Color Line," Indiana Magazine of History 104 (September 2008) — approximately 2,300 Black residents in 1930, of a city population of 115,000.
4. U.S. Census Bureau, censuses of 2000, 2010 and 2020 — Black alone, non-Hispanic: 35,391 (17.2%), 38,514 (15.2%), 39,560 (15.0%), as carried in the Population section.