Return to: Back in the Day - Indiana's Black History

DECADE BY DECADE

Era of change, shame

BY ROB SCHNEIDER

Published: April 4, 1999

It certainly wasn't a rainbow.

Life is hardly ever a perfect pattern of brilliant colors. No, the 1920s in Indianapolis was a messy palette of hues.

There were spectacular brush strokes of a live-wire city: Monument Circle was redefined, work on the stunning, four-block Indiana World War Memorial plaza got under way, Meridian Street was radically altered and residential districts grew like nobody's business.

And then there were huge swirls of dark tones of hate and suspicion.

Segregation became more pronounced, and suspicions of foreigners that grew during World War I became an "us vs. them" attitude. And "them" included just about anybody who was different.

An ardent, Protestant, America-first group, the Ku Klux Klan, saw its membership, power and prestige puff up like a hot-air balloon. Headlines in a Klan newspaper proclaiming an election victory in 1924 state "Protestant Ticket Sweeps State" and "National Papal Machine Smashed." Klan Day at the Indiana State Fairgrounds drew 10,000 people, a relatively small number, considering as many as 40 percent of all native-born white men in the city paid $10 to join the group.

It was a decade that saw the city celebrate its 100th birthday in an era of continuing optimism, but opportunities were for those who looked and acted like "us." Clearly, in 1920, white was the predominant color of the rainbow.

About 95 percent of the state's population was born Hoosier, and 97 percent was white, giving Indiana the largest proportion of white, native-born residents in the nation, according to historian James H. Madison.

Yet, with all the sameness, it was a time of immense change.

Two years into the new decade, a newspaper reporter looked around and noted: "Even to the casual observer, it was apparent there is an unusual amount of building going on." The reporter tells of three buildings just finished in the heart of Downtown as 10 more structures pushed skyward.

Searching for words to describe what was going on, local historian William Selm settled on "phenomenal" and "revolutionary." "The only thing to compare it to is the 1980s," Selm said. In the 1980s, building tended to involve monster projects such as the Hoosier Dome. In the 1920s, several buildings - albeit smaller in scale - were going up in a single block.

Imagine the Soldiers and Sailors Monument as ground zero, with ripples of change radiating out.

Around the Circle, older buildings vanished as a new generation took their place: The Guarantee (1922) and Test (1925) buildings on the southwest quadrant, and the Columbia Club (1924-25) on the northeast quadrant.

Indianapolis spreads out Now look north.

It's as if someone has yanked the corner of a tablecloth, sending venerable mansions and other buildings of the previous century tumbling out of the way.

To entice the American Legion to pick Indianapolis as its national headquarters, the city agreed to build a war memorial and office building. It set about preparing the site between Pennsylvania and Meridian streets. Using the U.S. Courthouse and the Central Library as bookends, everything else was moved out of the way.

Old, stately mansions north along Meridian were pushed out of the way, too, as businesses keen to be Downtown moved in. The Spink-Arms (1922), 410 N. Meridian, became the first hotel to build north of Ohio Street.

Today's landmarks popped up like mushrooms after a rain spell.

A quick list would include the Scottish Rite Cathedral (1929), the Indiana Theatre (1927), the Madame Walker Building (1927), Shortridge (1928), Crispus Attucks (1927) and Cathedral (1927) high schools, a number of buildings at the State Fairgrounds, and the Marott Hotel (1926).

Seven Downtown apartment buildings, from the Ambassador (1924) at 39 E. Ninth St. to the Wyndham (1929) at 1040 N. Delaware St., were erected, and the first two blocks of East Market Street were dubbed the "Wall Street of Indianapolis," as they became home to nearly a dozen banks and trust companies.

Farther out, Butler University moved to its current campus from Irvington, and Jordan Hall (1928) and Hinkle Fieldhouse (1928) were built.

The Gothic-style Tabernacle Presbyterian Church (1923) was built at 34th Street and Central Avenue, and St. Joan of Arc Catholic Church (1929) went up, looking as though it was plucked from the streets of Rome and set down at 42nd and Central.

Along Indiana Avenue And then there was the "stem," as some people called it. Most of us know it as Indiana Avenue.

The area was a steppingstone of sorts. New arrivals - like immigrants from Eastern Europe - had gotten a start on the avenue and moved on.

Now it was home to blacks, who found their options severely limited as segregation hardened in place like quick-pour cement.

By 1910, Indianapolis had the largest population of black Americans north of the Ohio River. In fact, a migration of blacks north after World War I increased the black population in Indianapolis from 34,678 in 1920 to 43,967 in 1930.

This put a strain on the few existing black neighborhoods that lay to the north and west of Downtown.

When middle-class blacks sought better housing outside these areas, they ran into a number of roadblocks.

In 1926, the City Council adopted an ordinance requiring blacks to first get the permission of white residents before moving onto a block. It was declared unconstitutional, but efforts to restrict housing choices for blacks continued.

By necessity then, Indiana Avenue became a town within a town.

"People had to create their own good times, their own sunshine," said Jean Spears, curator of the Historic Ransom Place Museum, a residential area near Indiana Avenue.

"Everything could be found there . . . little children, gamblers, ladies trying to get their shopping done," Spears said.

It was a place where groceries, bakeries, hardware and clothing stores, as well as professional offices, could be found.

But it was more than just a business strip. There were hole-in-the-wall dance clubs, and joints where musicians joined jam sessions.

When the Madame Walker Theatre opened in 1927 on Indiana Avenue at North and West streets, it became the place to be seen.

It was there that the Coffee Pot restaurant could be found, a place that specialized in fried chicken dinners. The restaurant's rooms often were rented out for social occasions.

The "Black Meridian Street," named for its well-kept homes and lawns, was found just off the avenue along California Street.

Racism runs rampant in Indiana There were other images, too, of the hate and fear that at times gripped the city.

In the May primary of 1924, the Ku Klux Klan emerged as the dominant party. On May 25, an estimated 25,000 Klansmen, women and children gathered at the State Fairgrounds.

Later the same day, Klan members assembled at 14th Street and Capitol Avenue for a parade.

Most of the marchers wore masks, while some wore hoods and robes. Several hundred women in their uniforms, with tam-o'-shanters instead of peaked hoods and yellow masks, participated in the parade, The Indianapolis Star reported.

The marchers numbered some 6,500, according to news reports, while a crowd of 75,000 to 100,000 lined the streets and filled the windows of buildings along the march route.

These were seen as scary times, said James Divita, a professor of history at Marian College - even more upsetting, in some ways, than the previous decade, which included the back-to-back catastrophes of the great 1913 flood, World War I and a killer flu of 1918.

The war was over, but the payoff seemed to be the return home of wounded and disfigured men. And then radicals seemed bent on taking over the world.

Thus, suspicions that had been aimed at Germans during the war didn't die when the battles ended.

A discussion in 1923 about the teaching of German in public schools led the president pro tem of the Indiana Senate, James Nejdl, a Republican from Lake County, to boast, "Though I am a foreign-born citizen, a Bohemian, and my wife is an American-born citizen of Bohemian parents, I am proud to say that neither of my children can speak a word of any language except English," historian Madison wrote in his book, Indiana Through Tradition and Change.

In a city that prided itself on being 100 percent American, foreigners found themselves pressured to put away their funny old clothes and stop speaking their native languages.

Prohibition, in fact, also was partly a reflection of cultural differences. Some wanted to control the drinking habits of ethnic groups, said Lamont Hulse, associate director of The Polis Center.

The center, based at IUPUI, studies Indianapolis and other Indiana cities, and one of its projects is The Encyclopedia of Indianapolis.

Klan preys on biases, distrust Uniformity was viewed as the norm and the standard, Divita said of the 1920s. "Anyone who in religion, language or culture is different than the dominant group would be under suspicion." And the Klan was ready to take advantage of those fears.

The Klan's message was simple: It claimed to stand for what was good for America, said David G. Vanderstel, a senior historian at The Polis Center.

Most people today think of the Klan as anti-black, but in the 1920s, it also was anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish and anti-Socialist, Vanderstel noted.

The Klan hit the state like a brush fire. It established its first chapter in Evansville in 1920 and quickly became the largest social organization in Indianapolis and the dominant force in city politics from 1921 to 1928, according to the Encyclopedia of Indianapolis.

Political candidates openly supported by the Klan won the mayor's office, the City Council and the Board of School Commissioners in 1925. Klan-supported candidates also controlled the legislature and governor's office.

Then their fortunes turned.

Klan-backed candidates elected to the offices of mayor and City Council in Indianapolis were forced out by a series of scandals.

The Klan also lost its grand dragon in 1925, when D.C. Stephenson of Indianapolis was convicted of second-degree murder.

Yet, the Klan continued to be a force in Indiana as the decade sputtered out.

And one last building was erected that captured the imagination of the time. Fittingly, it was at ground zero, Monument Circle.

"Circle Tower is the finest Art Deco building in the city," local historian Selm said of the architectural style that saw its heyday in the '20s.

And its Egyptian-inspired motifs that cover the two-story arched entrance to the elevator doors reflect the Egyptian-mania that followed the discovery of King Tutankhamen's tomb in 1922.

Besides being a time capsule of sorts, Selm said, it is a tombstone of the decade.

In 1929, as the building was under construction, the stock market crashed and unemployment became the new fear.

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