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1946 – 1947
A road through the neighborhood: In mid-1946 Fort Wayne's civic leaders conceived the Anthony Wayne Parkway — intersecting expressways across the heart of the city to revive the downtown — with an east-west road drawn through the center of the east-central district, where almost all Black Fort Wayners lived. The project would have displaced 15 percent of the city's population at a moment of acute housing shortage, and its racial arithmetic was plain to everyone: Black residents displaced from east-central would have to be relocated somewhere, and white property owners feared for their values if that somewhere was their neighborhood. The opposition organized as the Property Owners and Taxpayers Association (POTA); its printed statements never mentioned race, but Morgan's account — confirmed for him in 1980 interviews with veterans of both campaigns — records a "whispering campaign" that planted the fear, and a Democratic mayoral campaign, behind the realtor Henry Branning, an avowed opponent of open housing, that kept it at a pitch. The project's supporters answered with the Better Homes Foundation, under the white realtor E. H. Kilbourne — a man known in the Black community for his involvement with the Phyllis Wheatley Center — which promised displaced owners two-and-a-half times assessed value and no clearance before 1954; Black critics answered that the foundation had no capital and no concrete plans. Black Fort Wayne, whose own Fort Wayne Weekly Carrier — a newsletter produced by two Black members of POTA — warned residents they would be "herded onto any unwanted land that is available," voted overwhelmingly against the road, in coalition with the white property owners in its path.
On November 1947 the voters rejected the expressway by 24,786 (61.7 percent) to 15,364 (38.2 percent); only seven precincts, all high-income suburbs, returned a majority for it. The Democrats took the mayorship — their only municipal victory in the thirty years between 1929 and 1959 — and Branning's administration then colluded in the reimposition of the segregation the next entry describes. Morgan's judgment on the episode is the sharpest in his study: in big cities, black neighborhoods paid for urban progress with devastation; Fort Wayne's Black community "escaped the ravages of urban reconstruction visited on black communities in many big cities," delivered, paradoxically, by the racism of white Fort Wayne in the 1947 highway referendum.
Sources:
- Iwan W. Morgan, "Latecomers to the Industrial City," IMH 95 (March 1999) — the parkway plan, POTA and the whispering campaign, the Better Homes Foundation and Kilbourne, the Fort Wayne Weekly Carrier (25 October 1947, Branning Papers), the referendum figures (Journal Gazette and News-Sentinel, 5 November 1947), and the closing judgment.