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Indiana Archives
African American History
John M. Glen, Stephen G. Mcshane, Brenda Nelson-Strauss, Paul C. Heyde, and Wilma L. Gibbs
| Half a century after the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown) v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954), and four decades since the passage of the momentous Civil Rights Act of 1964, the In-diana Archives series assesses some of the state's archival holdings in African American history. These featured collections document the variegated record of black experiences in Indiana, a record that contains remarkable and precedent-setting achievements as well as innumerable instances of discrimination and resistance. |
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During much of the first half of the twentieth century, black Indianans commonly faced discrimination at restaurants, hotels, hospitals, theaters, and public schools and beaches. And while the Great Migration brought increasing numbers of blacks to the state, whites sometimes reacted vehemently, as in the case of the prolonged strike at Gary's Froebel High School in 1945 demanding the removal of black students. Public schools—at the primary, secondary, and university levels—reacted slowly to the Indiana General Assembly's 1949 legislation abolishing public school segregation. Some positive changes occurred in the 1950s—more jobs became available to African Americans in the post-war era, and the state basketball championships won by the all-black teams at Crispus Attucks High School in 1955 and 1956 helped influence subsequent school desegregation—yet exclusion from public accommodations and discrimination in housing and employment persisted. |
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The General Assembly enacted a series of civil rights measures in the early 1960s that were in some cases more extensive than federal laws of that decade, yet the state's African Americans confronted new challenges. Shifting residential patterns and official inaction made genuine school desegregation difficult, prompting the Indianapolis chapter of the NAACP to file a lawsuit against the city's public school system. The suit sparked a prolonged legal battle that ultimately resulted in the large-scale busing of students within most of the city beginning in 1980, a solution that was never fully satisfactory and was already being phased out at the end of the twentieth century. Court orders and school reorganization plans also settled desegregation suits in a number of other Indiana communities. Meanwhile, a growing number of black voters and the rising prominence of racial issues helped elect Richard Hatcher mayor of Gary in 1967—one of the first African American mayors of a major American city. Hatcher and his successors, however, struggled to offset the long-term economic decline of the Calumet region. In 1972, Gary took center stage in the initiative to broaden black political power when it hosted the National Black Caucus, and increasing black migration to urban industrial centers throughout the state continued to heighten the political visibility of African Americans. Nevertheless, black protest in Indiana remained largely moderate, non-violent, and well within conventional political channels. |
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The new century finds Indiana, like the rest of the nation, with two black populations: one, the steadily growing number of entrepreneurs, professionals, college students, and middle-class homeowners (epitomized by the rise to prominence within the state and nation of the three-and-one-half-decade-old Indiana Black Expo in Indianapolis); another, comprising poorer households, often headed by a single parent, still trapped in deteriorating older neighborhoods, confronting crime and rocky relations with local law enforcement, and faced with inadequate educational and employment opportunities and an array of attendant social problems. |
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