Indiana Avenue Historic District - Indianapolis, IN

Indiana Avenue was the center of Black culture in Indianapolis. During the Jazz Era legends like Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald played alongside locals like the Hampton Sisters and Wes Montgomery at the 30-plus clubs in the neighborhood. "The Avenue" was also home to the headquarters of Madam C. J. Walker’s majestic theater and hair care manufacturing company, prominent Black churches, Black newspapers, and Black-owned businesses. Urban renewal projects, particularly the expansion of Indiana University destroyed the neighborhood in the mid-20th century. Although the University Medical Center (the forerunner of today’s IUPUI campus) had bought surrounding property piecemeal since the 1920’s, and this continued well into the 1970s, in the 1950’s federal funding targeting so-called ‘urban-blight’ made rapid and aggressive acquisitions of surrounding neighborhoods possible, expanding the power of eminent domain, and destroying communities in the process. The present day IUPUI campus was home to a neighborhood that in the middle of the twentieth century was the center of African American life in central Indiana, including a business district, schools, churches, leisure spaces and homes of both affluent and impoverished families. In the 1950s two urban renewal projects directed by the Indianapolis Redevelopment Commission removed residents to sell their land to the university. The Commission purchased properties (104 homes in the first case and a neighborhood comprising 18 acres in the other), relocated residents, cleared the land, and sold it to the university. A January 1970 IUPUI memo demonstrates that the university was fully aware of the displacement of this community and the resulting ill-will stating that the projects “significantly reduced the area’s supply of low cost housing. … In fact, as social and commercial services disappear from the neighborhood tenants and home owners are asking if the City and the University are not making the area so barren that people are forced to move out rather than “die on the vine.” Institutions are behaving in ways which look like the same old obstacles which poor Black folk have experienced over past years. There is some local bitterness about the “paternalistic” approach common to organizations purporting to serve the neigborhood. The white or “giving” group usually selects the local leadership it will work with, and secondly the grou selects the services it thinks the neighborhood needs. People are no longer willing to appear grateful for things they never asked for. They are understandably upset … by massive change forces over which they feel they have little control.”