The African/African-American Historical Society Museum

Museum opened 1 February 2000

Founding: The museum at 436 East Douglas Avenue is the work of Hana Stith — among the first Black teachers hired by Fort Wayne Community Schools, and the society's founder and curator until her death in 2018. The African/African-American Historical Society Museum opened its doors on 1 February 2000, dedicated to the community by Chief Anthony Ogunsusi, whose ceremonial dress uniforms from the inauguration remain on display. Its charge is double: the history of Africa, and the history of people of African descent in Allen County from 1809 to the present. It holds what it describes as the area's largest public collection of African art, with rooms on Black inventors, local leaders, and sports, and the Warfield diaries among its documentary holdings; in 2003 the society commissioned and produced "We've Come This Far by Faith," a video history of Black churches in Fort Wayne from 1849 to 2000. (The community the museum serves, and the Wheatley Center's institutional history, are in the Communities record; this entry is the museum.)

The building: The house itself is an exhibit. It served as the Phyllis Wheatley Center and the Fort Wayne Urban League's first office, and it is the only building still standing in Fort Wayne that was listed in the Negro Motorist Green Book — as "Mrs. B. Talbot's Tourist Home," a lodging for Black travelers barred from the city's white hotels. It is the survivor of a row of nineteenth-century houses in the neighborhood southeast of downtown that was home to many of the city's Black residents before postwar commercial expansion took the rest.

The lean years: The museum once had a paid director and regular hours; it now runs on volunteers and a budget the Journal Gazette put in October 2026 at under 5,000 dollars a year, with once-a-month open hours. COVID closed it to regular visitors, and a failing heating system in early 2022 threatened the collection itself before a 7,500-dollar grant from the Standiford H. Cox Fund helped install new furnaces in 2023. Its board is working to bring visitors back and is seeking local and national historic designations for the Douglas Avenue building.

Sources:

1. African/African-American Historical Society Museum (aaahsm.org) and its museum records — opened 1 February 2000 at 436 East Douglas Avenue; the 2003 church-history video (via ACGSI).
2. Indiana Landmarks, 19 April 2023 — the museum founded in 2000, the area's largest public collection of African art, Allen County Black history from 1809, the Green Book listing as Mrs. B. Talbot's Tourist Home, the 2022 heating failure and the Cox Fund grant.
3. The Journal Gazette, 30 October 2026, via We Are Black America — the sub-5,000-dollar budget, volunteer operation, the building's Wheatley Center and first Urban League office years, the designation effort.
4. Input Fort Wayne — Dr. John Aden and Leah Reeder as volunteer staff; the Warfield diaries.