Women and Black Founders

the record, searched whole

The standard rosters of Fort Wayne founders are rosters of men, and most of them are white; this entry gathers what the whole record — Business, People, Inventors, Fashion, Communities and the press file — actually holds for the founders those rosters miss. The women stand first, and several stand in this section in their own right: Barbara Bradley Baekgaard and Patricia R. Miller, who founded Vera Bradley in 1982; Joan White, who carried Bowmar's founding household and worked its presses; Teddi Krauskopf, co-founder of K&K in 1952; and Marion Ward, president of the pattern company she and her husband opened in 1964. The Inventors section profiles two more founders in full: Gertrude A. Muller and Ethel Mossman Jacobs. The People longtail profiles Julia E. Emanuel, who established her own pharmacy business in 1902 — the Chemist Shop, at 201 West Berry Street from 1907. The Fashion section holds Ethel Clemons, who trained at the Madam C. J. Walker school in Indianapolis and then opened her own beauty shop on Hanna Street. For Black founders, the named and documented record in the sources worked begins with the press: Edward N. Smith founded the Frost Illustrated in 1968, and it ran forty-nine years as Fort Wayne's oldest weekly before its final issue in October 2017; John Dortch founded the Fort Wayne Ink Spot, whose first issue of 12 March 2018 made it the only Black-owned newspaper in northeast Indiana — both papers' courses are the Communities and Newspapers sections'. For the generations before Smith, the record reached names institutions rather than proprietors: the Communities section records that by the turn of the twentieth century Black Fort Wayners "owned and operated businesses of their own," and dates the Phyllis Wheatley Social Center's founding to 1920 — but no individual Black proprietor of the industrial era is named in the sources worked for this record, and this entry states that thin result plainly rather than filling it in.

Sources:

1. This section — the Vera Bradley, Bowmar, K&K and Ward entries, cross-referenced; Inventors & Inventions — the Gertrude A. Muller and Ethel Mossman Jacobs profiles; Notable People — the Julia E. Emanuel profile; Fashion — Ethel Clemons.
2. the Communities and Newspapers record — Edward N. Smith's Frost Illustrated (1968–2017), John Dortch's Fort Wayne Ink Spot (from 12 March 2018), the turn-of-the-century business ownership statement and the Phyllis Wheatley Social Center's 1920 founding.