Fort Wayne Black History

Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad & the Antebellum City · freedom seekers, the exclusion vote, and the politics of 1860–1864

Underground Railroad

The first community

The presence precedes the town: Dodie Marie Miller's African Americans in Fort Wayne: The First 200 Years , the community's own published history, begins its story in 1794, the year of the American fort, on evidence…

• The first names · Black residents of the fort era
• The Hanna Addition settlement · the first families
• Exclusion and decline · what Article XIII did here
• The count · Black Fort Wayne in the censuses
• The first wave and its reversal · 1917–1940
• The Black population series, 1850–2020Also in Population

Churches

Founded by named men, on a dated deed: Turner Chapel is Fort Wayne's oldest Black congregation, and its founding is a document, not a tradition. By 1845 the A.M.E. Church's Ohio and Western Conference had taken…

• Turner Chapel A.M.E. · the first institution
• The other historic congregations · Pilgrim, Mount Olive and Union, True Love
• Turner Chapel A.M.E. ChurchAlso in Churches & Religion
• The second wave of Black congregations: First Zion and Pilgrim BaptistAlso in Churches & Religion
• St. Augustine Lutheran Church: a pan-African congregationAlso in Churches & Religion

Civil rights

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…

• The Phyllis Wheatley Center and the Urban League · the organizing center
• The organizing record · the NAACP, the clubs, and Dr. King's visit

Notable people

Police: Leah H. Reeder's survey in Frost Illustrated names Arthur Williams as Fort Wayne's first African American policeman, the second Oliver Lee , hired in 1919 , and Laura Jackson as the department's first Black…

• Uniforms and counters · the firsts of the service record
• The barrier-breakers in uniform — the police firstsAlso in Public Servants
• The firehouse firsts — Ridley, Wilson and DavieAlso in Public Servants

Neighborhoods

The federal appraisal: In the 1930s the Home Owners' Loan Corporation made a detailed real estate appraisal of every sizable American city, Fort Wayne included; its confidential survey of the city is dated 24 September…

• The housing machinery · the map, the covenant, the project
• The expressway fight · the referendum that saved East Central
• The corridor · East Central, Hanna Street, and the Green Book
• The color line, and the Green Book's Fort WayneAlso in Hotels

Business

The professions a segregated economy allowed: Black Fort Wayne's first documented businesses served the community itself. The Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center's Marsha Smiley Collection — its "Crossing…

• Barbers, beauty culture, physicians, undertakers · the early professions
• War work · the factory gate, 1942–1963

Press

Read in the Recorder first: For its first decades of print, Black Fort Wayne was covered by a newspaper published ninety miles away. The Indianapolis Recorder , Indiana's great Black weekly, carried Fort Wayne's news…

• The Black press · papers of record for a community the dailies missed
• The Black Press — from the Observer to the Ink SpotAlso in Newspapers & Media

Education

The northern pattern: Fort Wayne's school board never operated racially separate schools by law. Segregation arrived the northern way — by boundary. Postwar boundary-drawing concentrated Black pupils as the Black…

• The school fight · concentration, boycott, settlement
• Desegregation at the elementary schools — the boycott, the settlement, the magnetsAlso in Schools & Colleges

Sports

Forty-two seasons: The longest-lived Black institution in Fort Wayne outside the churches was a baseball team. The Fort Wayne Colored Giants played from as early as 1907 until 1949 — the dates Alfred Brothers Jr.…

• The Fort Wayne Colored Giants · the city's Black ball club

Keepers of the record

The society that preserved it: In 1975 two Fort Wayne teachers, Hana L. Stith and Miles Edwards , began working with the county historical museum to gather a Black history no institution had kept — the founding act of…

• The keepers of the record · museums, monuments, and the mayor's office
• The African/African-American Historical Society MuseumAlso in Museums