The Fall Creek Parkway Ymca As a Lens on Indianapolis’ Urban
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THE BATTLE OVER A BLACK YMCA AND ITS INNER-CITY COMMUNITY: THE FALL CREEK PARKWAY YMCA AS A LENS ON INDIANAPOLIS’ URBAN REVITALIZATION AND SCHOOL DESEGREGATION, 1959-2003 Melissa Grace Burlock Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in the Department of History, Indiana University, February 2014 Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. Master’s Thesis Committee ________________________________ Philip V. Scarpino, Ph.D., Chair ________________________________ Modupe G. Labode, D.Phil. ________________________________ Nancy Marie Robertson, Ph.D. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many organizations and individuals contributed to this project. I would like to thank the group of IUPUI public history students who first thought of and wrote a grant for the Fall Creek YMCA Oral History Project, as well as the following constituents and organizations for the necessary financial support that made this idea achievable, which included the Department of History and Public History at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Indiana Humanities, IUPUI Library, IUPUI Office of Diversity, IUPUI Office of Service and Learning, IUPUI Venture Fund, as well as the Greater Indianapolis Young Men’s Christian Association. This historical narrative also benefitted from the extensive African-American Collections meticulously created by Wilma Moore, Senior Archivist of African-American History at the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Center in the Indiana Historical Society. The research and material accumulation stage of this project was consistently facilitated by two YMCA staff members: Tangela Floyd, Communications Director at the YMCA of Greater Indianapolis (Indianapolis YMCA or IYMCA), who opened up her office as a storage space, provided the keys to the repository, as well as contacted potential interviewees; and Suzanne Fuse, Lead Secretary at the IYMCA, who patiently lent her help during my five month-long process of carting boxes and scanning numerous documents. I would also like to thank Ryan Bean, Reference and Outreach Archivist at the Kautz Family YMCA Archives at the University of Minnesota, for retrieving and scanning relative primary source documents, as well as Stephen Towne, IUPUI Associate Archivist in Archives/Special Collections, for uploading the audio recordings of my oral history interviews for the Fall Creek YMCA Oral History Project to IUPUI’s eArchives. iii I am especially grateful to Philip Scarpino, professor of history at IUPUI, for securing funding for the project, making an extensive inventory list of the IYMCA records stored in the English Foundation Building, as well as supervising my oral history project and final writing process. I would also like to thank IUPUI Professors Modupe Labode and Nancy Robertson for taking the time out of their schedules to read my initial drafts and discuss methodological approaches to the narrative of the Fall Creek YMCA. Thank you as well to the IUPUI Center for Service and Learning for recognizing my research and oral history project with the Sam H. Jones Scholarship award, and Larry Smith, Tangela’s predecessor at the IYMCA, for his early enthusiasm about the project. Thank you, Dad, for being my Encourager. Thank you, Mom, for being my first Teacher. Thank you Donny, for your prayers, and Sylvia Faith, for helping me to perfect images using Photo Shop. Thank you also to everyone who prayed for me during my writing process. And thank you, Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior, for your constant grace in all of my endeavors. Finally, I am sincerely indebted to the following interviewees without whose contributions of first-hand accounts this narrative would not have been “the whole story:” John Lands, Fall Creek YMCA Executive Director between 1971 and 1979; Norris Lineweaver, former CEO and President of the Greater Indianapolis YMCA between 1994 and 2005; LeVester Hobbs, Jordan YMCA Building Services Director; and Jocelyn- Tandy Adande, who became an elected Precinct Committeewoman in 2012. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Maps........................................................................................................................vi Introduction: Competing Visions of Indianapolis’ Historically Black YMCA...................1 Chapter One: The History of the Indianapolis and Senate Avenue YMCAs....................15 Chapter Two: The Mission of the Fall Creek YMCA within Indianapolis’ Pat Ward’s Bottoms Community, 1958-1979........................................................44 Chapter Three: The Movement to Desegregate and Redevelop Indianapolis’ Pat Ward’s Bottoms Community, 1960-1982........................................................89 Chapter Four: The Manifestation of Competing Visions over the Mission and Service Area of the Fall Creek YMCA within Indianapolis’ “Bottoms” Area, 2000-2003………………………………………………………………..116 Conclusion: A Tale of One YMCA and Two Visions.....................................................161 Bibliography....................................................................................................................164 Curriculum Vitae v List of Maps Map 1. Central Business District of Indianapolis, 1945........................................................40 2. Central Business District of Indianapolis, 2002......................................................103 3. Lockefield Gardens Historic District, 2001……………………………………….104 4. Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area of Indianapolis, 1970…………………….131 5. Indianapolis Public Transit Map, 2013....................................................................149 vi Introduction: Competing Visions of Indianapolis’ Historically Black YMCA The narrative of the Fall Creek Parkway YMCA is central to the record of the historically black community northwest of downtown Indianapolis, which was established in the early 1900s, as well as reflective of the urban revitalization projects and demographic fluxes that changed this community beginning in the 1960s. This is because the conflict between administrators of the Fall Creek YMCA branch and Greater Indianapolis YMCA or Metropolitan YMCA over the viability of the branch at 10th Street and Indiana Avenue was a microcosm of the conflict between community and city leaders over the necessity of large-scale forces. This thesis specifically examines the large-scale forces of urban revitalization, defined in the study as the city’s implementation of construction projects in Indianapolis’ downtown area, and school desegregation, which was the focus of a federal court case that affected Indianapolis Public Schools. Delineating the contested visions held by Fall Creek and Metropolitan YMCA administrators about how the Fall Creek YMCA should have functioned within an environment changed by urban revitalization and school desegregation is crucial to understanding the controversies that surrounded major construction projects and desegregation measures that took place in the downtown area of Indianapolis during the late twentieth century. The relationship between the Fall Creek YMCA Board, community leaders, and the Metropolitan YMCA Board, explicitly reflected the conflict between community groups and agents of urban revitalization. Proponents of those redevelopment projects 1 intensified their activities between the 1960s and 1980s.1 For example, approximately 80 percent of Lockefield Gardens Apartments, the public housing project constructed for African Americans in the late 1930s and financed by New Deal funds, was demolished in 1983 as part of a plan developed by the Midtown Economic Development Industrial Corporation (MEDIC), Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), and Wishard Memorial Hospital. 2 The complex had been vacated in 1973 in accordance with a 1971 ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Samuel Hugh Dillin to redress residential segregation and by extension school segregation.3 The 1960s and 1970s were also the preliminary decades during which the real estate department of Indiana University rapidly increased its acquisition of residential and business properties that made up the historically black community surrounding Indiana Avenue in near-downtown Indianapolis. IU’s expansion paralleled other urban revitalization projects that targeted the downtown area, specifically the construction of Highway I-65. As a consequence of such urban revitalization and school desegregation measures, the Fall Creek YMCA shifted from being the center of a historically black 1 Clyde Griffen, Preface: “Towards a Future History of the YMCA,” in Men and Women Adrift: The YMCA and the YWCA in the City, ed. Nina Mjagkij and Margaret Spratt (New York and London: New York University Press, 1997), xv; Ralph D. Gray, IUPUI: The Making of an Urban University (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003), 49. Note: The Greater Indianapolis YMCA will hereafter be referred to by interchangeable titles, including the Greater Indianapolis Metropolitan YMCA, Metropolitan YMCA, metropolitan association, and the Indianapolis YMCA or IYMCA. 2 Leigh Darbee, “Lockefield Gardens,” in The Encyclopedia of Indianapolis. Seventeen buildings were demolished as part of the joint plan. 3 Ralph D. Gray, IUPUI: The Making of an Urban University (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003), 146. 2 community to a microcosm of large-scale processes and ensuing public controversy.4