The keepers of the record · museums, monuments, and the mayor's office

1975 – TODAY

The society that preserved it: In 1975 two Fort Wayne teachers, Hana L. Stith and Miles Edwards, began working with the county historical museum to gather a Black history no institution had kept — the founding act of the African/African-American Historical Society of Allen County. The museum the society built opened on 1 February 2000 at 436 East Douglas Avenue, in the building that had been the Phyllis Wheatley Center and the Urban League's first office — the community's archive installed in the community's own surviving house. Stith, its founder and curator, died in 2018; the volunteer-run museum, reported by the Journal Gazette in October 2026 as working on a budget under $5,000 a year, was then seeking historic designations for the Wheatley Center building itself. Around the museum the scholarship and memory-work of the present generation stands: Miller's African Americans in Fort Wayne: The First 200 Years, the community's own Arcadia history, built from diaries, oral histories and church and club records; Elliott's Before the Dream (2021); the ACPL Genealogy Center's Marsha Smiley Collection of Black pioneer profiles; and the monuments — the Pillars of Hope and Justice and the Dr. King bridge downtown, the East Central mural, Nuckols Memorial Park (renamed for the councilman in 1986) and the Nuckols bust at the Urban League honoring John Nuckols Day, proclaimed 2 February 2026. A Fort Wayne Black Chamber of Commerce publishes today as the community's business voice.

The first mayor: The modern office record begins on the county side. Sharon Tucker was elected a 1st District Allen County Councilwoman in 2014 and re-elected in 2018 — the first Black woman to hold that seat — and then served as Fort Wayne's 6th District city councilwoman from 2020 to 2024, likewise the first Black woman in the seat; Michelle Chambers had become, by the Smiley Collection's account, the first African-American woman to hold an at-large city council seat. On 20 April 2024, after the death in office of Mayor Tom Henry, Fort Wayne's Democratic precinct committeemen chose Tucker by caucus to succeed him; on 23 April 2024 she was sworn in as the city's 37th mayor — its first Black mayor, its first Black female mayor, and only its second woman in the office. The arc this section opened with — a free Black community of thirty families in 1850, excluded by the state's constitution, counted in every census since — arrives two centuries on at the mayor's office, held by a woman of the community the censuses once counted to erase.

Sources:

1. The Communities record of this history and the African/African-American Historical Society's own account — Stith and Edwards, 1975; the museum's opening, 1 February 2000, at 436 E. Douglas Ave.; Stith's death, 2018; Journal Gazette, 30 October 2026, on the museum's budget and designation efforts.
2. Dodie Marie Miller, African Americans in Fort Wayne: The First 200 Years (Arcadia); Christopher Warren Elliott, Before the Dream (Arcadia, 2021); the ACPL Genealogy Center's Marsha Smiley Collection index.
3. Fort Wayne City Parks and ACGSI — Hayden Park renamed Nuckols Memorial Park, 1986; the Journal Gazette, February 2026 — John Nuckols Day proclaimed 2 February 2026; the Garcia and Nuckols busts unveiled at the Fort Wayne Urban League.
4. City of Fort Wayne and AroundFortWayne (23 April 2024), the Journal Gazette, and Indiana University Fort Wayne (September 2024) — Sharon Tucker: county council 2014–2019, city council 2020–2024, caucus of 20 April 2024, sworn in 23 April 2024 as the 37th mayor, the first Black mayor and first Black woman mayor; the Smiley Collection — Michelle Chambers, first African-American woman at-large councilwoman.
5. Black Chamber Fort Wayne (blackchamberfortwayne.com) — the chamber's current published presence.