The Black population series, 1850–2020

1850 — 2020

The census counted Black Fort Wayne from the beginning, and counted it small: In 1850 the federal census found 81 free "colored" people in the city of Fort Wayne and 102 in all of Allen County — 1.9 percent of the city, 0.6 percent of the county — in a state whose 1851 constitution would attempt to bar Black settlement altogether. The county's historians caution that the 1850 enumeration likely undercounted even that small community. The community behind those figures — its churches, its place in the Underground Railroad era, its growth through the Great Migration and after — is told in the Communities and UGRR sections. The count itself moves slowly for seventy years: the Thirteenth Census of 1910 recorded 572 Black residents in the city, 0.9 percent of the whole, in a city that recruited its industrial workforce overwhelmingly from native-born and German stock and drew, in the words of the scholarship, few African American migrants in the years when other northern industrial cities were transformed.

The transformation came later and is written in the modern censuses. By 1970 the non-Hispanic white share of the city had fallen to 87.7 percent, and in the three most recent censuses the Black population (counted as Black alone, non-Hispanic) stood at 35,391 in 2000, 38,514 in 2010 and 39,560 in 2020 — a community that grew at every one of those counts. Its share of the city eased across the same span, from 17.2 percent to 15.2 percent to 15.0 percent, not because the community shrank but because the denominator changed around it: the annexations of the 2000s added largely white suburbs to the city, and the Hispanic and Asian counts grew faster from smaller bases. Read whole, the series is a study in two kinds of growth — a small, old, persistently counted community for the city's first century, and one of the city's largest populations, still growing, in its second.

Sources:

1. U.S. Census of 1850 — 81 free "colored" persons in Fort Wayne and 102 in Allen County, via Charles R. Poinsatte, Fort Wayne During the Canal Era, 1828–1855, as cited in "The Fort Wayne Standard: A Reform Newspaper in the 1850s Storm," Indiana Magazine of History XCVII (September 2001), which also carries the undercount caution. The census term is quoted as the census printed it.
2. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census (1910) — 572 Black residents ("Negroes" in the census's term) in Fort Wayne, as reprinted in Griswold and Phelps (1913).
3. Peggy Seigel, Indiana Magazine of History (2003) — Fort Wayne attracted few African American migrants in the 1900–1920 industrial boom.
4. U.S. Census Bureau, censuses of 2000, 2010 and 2020 — Black alone, non-Hispanic: 35,391 (17.20%), 38,514 (15.18%), 39,560 (14.99%); non-Hispanic white share in 1970, 87.7 percent, as reported with the 2010 census returns.