The Phyllis Wheatley Center and the Urban League · the organizing center

1920 – TODAY

A century on Douglas Avenue and Hanna Street: In 1920 Black Fort Wayners founded the Phyllis Wheatley Social Center — named for the poet Phillis Wheatley — as the recreational and social hub of Black Fort Wayne, housed at 421 Douglas Avenue. Funded at first through the National Recreation Association and from 1925 by the Fort Wayne Community Chest, the center affiliated with the National Urban League in 1930. Its executive secretary from 1925 to 1942 was Edgar J. Unthank, a Lincoln College graduate who had been a social worker in Shreveport and Barberton before Fort Wayne; with Girls Work Secretary Elma E. Alsup and Boys Work Secretary John Ridley, Unthank built working relationships with local employers and counseled individual job seekers — the center's report for 1936–37 counts more than 200 men and women placed in new jobs in a labor market that offered Black workers only its bottom rungs. In March 1933 the center ran a six-week training course for domestic servants at Central High School, taught by two college professors and a high school teacher; seventy-five women enrolled in the first class. Its Industrial Women's Club, part of a network of YWCA-sponsored clubs across the Midwest, kept working women abreast of conditions and labor law. In the Depression the center ran an annex at 503 East Breckenridge Street that sheltered as many as forty homeless Black men a night and served an average of seventy-five meals a day. Fort Wayne's delegates to the National Negro Congress's organizing convention in Chicago in 1936 were the center's people and its sponsored organizations — the City Federation of Colored Women's Clubs, the Toujour Fidele Club, the Mothers Club, the Men's Civic League.

The center's second life was as the League outright. Freed of running the community's recreation by the opening of the biracial McCulloch community center in 1948, and studied by the National Urban League the same year, the association took the Urban League's name on 1 October 1949 — the League's own published history frames the date as the moment the Wheatley Center was disbanded and the association became known only as the Fort Wayne Urban League; Seigel's study carries the 1930 affiliation and the 1949 renaming as the distinct facts they are. Under executive secretary Robert Wilkerson, the League in 1949 persuaded Fort Wayne's largest department store to hire its first Black clerical worker, and its housing and employment campaigns run through the entries that follow. The Fort Wayne Urban League works today from 2135 South Hanna Street. The building the center started in had its own second life: 436 East Douglas Avenue, which had been listed in the Negro Motorist Green Book as Mrs. B. Talbot's Tourist Home — the only Green Book-listed building still standing in Fort Wayne, by the Indiana Department of Natural Resources' account — became the Urban League's first office and houses the African/African-American Historical Museum today.

Sources:

1. Peggy Seigel, "Pushing the Color Line," IMH 104 (September 2008) — Unthank, Alsup and Ridley; the 1936–37 placements; the 1933 domestic-training course; the Industrial Women's Club; the 1936 National Negro Congress delegation; Unthank's tenure 1925–1942 (with the Journal Gazette, 28 April 1942).
2. The History Center, "Fabric of the Fort" (February 2022), and the Fort Wayne Urban League's published history — the 1920 founding, the Community Chest from 1925, the 1930 affiliation, the Breckenridge Street annex, the 1948 study, the name taken 1 October 1949, and 2135 South Hanna Street today.
3. Iwan W. Morgan, "Latecomers to the Industrial City," IMH 95 (1999) — the McCulloch center (1948) and Wilkerson's 1949 department-store placement.
4. Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Division of Historic Preservation and Archaeology (2 October 2023), via ACGSI — 436 E. Douglas Avenue as "Mrs. B. Talbot's Tourist Home," the only Green Book-listed building still standing in Fort Wayne.