The organizing record · the NAACP, the clubs, and Dr. King's visit

1938 – 1963

The ballot first: Black Fort Wayne's first named officeholder predates the postwar era by a decade. In 1938 the Republicans nominated William Briggs for justice of the peace for Wayne Township — Morgan calls him the first Black candidate in the city's history — and he held the office until his death in 1950. (The Smiley Collection styles Briggs "1st African American State Court Judge of Allen County," a different and grander description than the justice of the peace of the published study's account; both are printed here, attributed, as the record gives them.) The Democratic Branning administration elected in the 1947 referendum opened municipal employment at the edges — five Black patrolmen taken on in 1949–50, the first Black social worker in the welfare department, Black laborers and cleaners in the utilities and schools; the first Black schoolteacher was appointed in 1952; and the first Black city councilman was elected in 1959, the barber John Nuckols of the First District, who held his seat until 1982 — his council record is told in the Government sections.

A chapter of the NAACP: The local NAACP chapter was established in 1946. Morgan's evidence is a letter from Joyce Humphrey to Ella Baker of the national office, dated 7 January 1946, in the NAACP Papers at the Library of Congress: the new chapter numbered about half white membership, and one Black founder avowed, "We do want to wake this very reactionary city to its often unrealized discriminations." Its first campaigns were against Jim Crow in the city's private and public facilities: in 1949, with the State Industrial Union Council holding its convention in Fort Wayne, civil rights organizations and the council forced the desegregation of downtown hotels and restaurants for the convention's duration — the ban was reimposed within days, the Branning administration colluding — and segregation of downtown public accommodations did not end until Indiana's strong civil rights law of 1963. The branch today is the Fort Wayne/Allen County Branch 3049; its annual Freedom Fund Banquet carries Marjorie Wickliffe's name (in 2017 it was billed as the seventy-second, an arithmetic consistent with the mid-1940s founding Morgan documents, though no charter document itself was reached). Presidents of record include Paulette Nellems (2011), Larry Gist (2017) and the Rev. Michael L. Latham Sr., who served ten years.

The frontiers of service — and a night with Dr. King: The civic-club record is documented most firmly in action. On 5 June 1963 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to more than 2,000 people at the Scottish Rite Auditorium — the building that is now the University of Saint Francis performing arts center — with several hundred more turned away, in an appearance arranged, by the Fort Wayne Komets and city accounts, by a group of church and civic leaders led by the African American Frontiers Club, the local unit of the Black service organization Frontiers International. Indiana Humanities credits King's longtime friend the Rev. Clyde Adams with the invitation; the two accounts are compatible, and together they are the record. The visit fell between the composition of the Letter from Birmingham Jail and the March on Washington. No complete recording of the speech is known to survive; the Historical Society has assembled the fullest ordering of his remarks from the next day's newspapers. "There comes a time," King said, "when a people get tired of injustice, oppression, exploitation… We want to be free." Fort Wayne built the memory twice: the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Bridge, first lit on the Unity Walk of June 2012, and the Pillars of Hope and Justice monument, dedicated on the sixtieth anniversary of the visit, 5 June 2023, at Main and Ewing streets. The movement history of the visit is Christopher Warren Elliott's Before the Dream: Martin Luther King's 1963 Speech, and Civil Rights Struggles in Fort Wayne, Indiana (Arcadia, 2021). In the same summer the local movement speaks in the record through the Legion hall: the Black veterans of Charles C. Anderson Post 148 led a floor protest at the state convention against the 40 et 8's whites-only clause — that fight is told in the Veterans record.

Sources:

1. Iwan W. Morgan, "Latecomers to the Industrial City," IMH 95 (March 1999) — Briggs 1938–1950; the Branning patronage firsts; Nuckols 1959; the NAACP chapter of 1946 (Joyce Humphrey to Ella Baker, 7 January 1946, NAACP Papers, Library of Congress); the 1949 convention desegregation and its reversal; the 1963 state law's end of public-accommodations segregation (with Emma Lou Thornbrough, "Breaking Racial Barriers in Public Accommodations in Indiana, 1935–1963," IMH 83, December 1987).
2. Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center, Marsha Smiley Collection — Briggs as "1st African American State Court Judge of Allen County," as the collection styles it.
3. City of Fort Wayne, "Mayor Henry recognized for signing MOU" and the 2023 Pillars dedication release; Fort Wayne Komets, "Congratulations to Chris D. Elliott"; Indiana Humanities, "Martin Luther King Jr. Speaks in Fort Wayne" (5 June 2014) — the 5 June 1963 address, the 2,000-plus crowd, the Frontiers Club and Rev. Clyde Adams attributions, the bridge lighting of 2012 and the monument of 5 June 2023.
4. Journal Gazette, 6 June 1963 (via AroundFortWayne, 2014) — "several hundred turned away" from the Scottish Rite Auditorium.
5. The Fort Wayne NAACP's own pages and the branch's obituary record — Branch 3049; the Marjorie D. Wickliffe Freedom Fund Banquet; Presidents Nellems (2011), Gist (2017), and the Rev. Michael L. Latham Sr. (obituary, Journal Gazette, 2019).