Indy’s lost Black neighborhood: How IUPUI displaced thousands

(MIRROR INDY) — Decades ago, Indiana Avenue was the center of Black cultural and economic life in the city. Known as Indianapolis’ Black Wall Street, the bustling corridor was surrounded by a predominantly Black neighborhood and bolstered by the Madam Walker Theatre and jazz clubs.

Today, though, the area surrounding the Avenue is largely a collection of sprawling lawns, concrete plazas and gargantuan buildings for what’s now IU Indianapolis and Purdue in Indianapolis. The only reminders of the once thriving Black neighborhood on the campuses are a few historical markers.

As IU and Purdue move away from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and spend millions to forge their own identities as separate campuses, it’s bringing renewed focus to the university’s complicated beginnings. From the 1960s to the 1980s, Indiana University systematically acquired around 300 acres of land to form the campus that would become IUPUI in 1969.

The university bought home after home — for what neighbors widely believed to be unfair prices — helping to drive Black residents out. In several cases, the university resorted to eminent domain to take property from unwilling sellers.

Soon, Black Wall Street largely withered and died. The Walker Theatre, a cornerstone of the Avenue that still stands as a stark reminder of the past, shuttered in the late 1970s before eventually being reborn as a cultural legacy center.

To Ken Morgan, former executive director of what’s now the Madam Walker Legacy Center, the neighborhood was more than just a collection of houses and businesses.

“It didn’t make any difference where you lived in Indianapolis,” Morgan said. “If you were African American, Indiana Avenue was a part of your community.”

Much has been said over the years about the loss of Indiana Avenue. But as students returned to campus for the fall semester, Mirror Indy reached out to former residents to understand Indianapolis’ lost Black neighborhood. Here’s what we learned:

• A home was a sanctuary for generations of a family that moved north to Indiana for freedom after the Civil War, including one of the city’s first Black police officers.
• A man returned home after serving in the military to discover most of his childhood memories had been razed and replaced with campus buildings. He then enrolled at IUPUI under the GI Bill.
• Residents tried for over a decade to save Lockefield Gardens, the city’s first public housing complex, before it was largely razed and redeveloped to create student housing.

There were two views of the area, though. Where Black neighbors saw a thriving place to live and the foundation for a long-lasting community, city and university leaders saw a problem to be solved.

Those leaders ultimately prevailed and drove the historical narrative of IUPUI’s origins for decades.

The displacement of Black westsiders was, in part, founded by a belief from top university and city leaders that the neighborhood was a slum riddled with crime and needed to be cleared out, per Board of Trustees minutes and archival interviews.

“Look around, you can see the great change that has been made,” IUPUI’s inaugural Chancellor Maynard Hine said in a 1990 interview. “When I came here, this was a very depressed area, and it was one of the worst slum districts in the country. And that was bad.”

University officials have been working for years to rectify the past wrongs, IU spokesperson Mark Bode said. That includes offering a scholarship for descendants of displaced residents, conducting public health research in westside neighborhoods and participating in plans to redevelop Indiana Avenue.

“The language used by leaders was often demeaning and discriminatory, adding to the substantial negative consequences for Black residents,” Bode said in a statement to Mirror Indy. “We are sorry for the actions that caused this disparate impact, which are not consistent with our values as a university.”

But there is no escaping that as IU bought up land, thousands of Black Indianapolis residents — some of whom had known nothing other than the near west side — scattered across the city, forever changing the fortunes of entire families.

Here are some of their stories.

The Temple family’s haven

University officials acquired homes over the course of years and even decades to build IUPUI. Here’s how it impacted one family.

Every August, Cecelia Boler’s family would drive down from eastern Michigan to the home of her family, the Temples, on the west side of Indianapolis.

When Boler and her family arrived, there’d be fresh, warm bread waiting for them on the kitchen table and relatives rushing to dole out hugs.

Over the three-day stays, the house was a revolving door of aunts, uncles and cousins. The walls hummed with laughter and chatter as Boler’s mother caught her family up on the year since they’d last seen each other.

“It was just a good time,” Boler, now 56, told Mirror Indy. “It was the most wonderful time I remember as a child.”

Today, the Temple family home at 550 Minerva St. is a memory. Nothing remains, not even the street. Boler’s grandmother Lucy Temple and aunt were some of the last in the area to sell their property to IU.

What stands in the house’s place today is University Tower, an IU residence hall for around 600 first-year students. For the Temples, Boler said, the loss of the home wasn’t just the loss of property. By the time the home was razed, the Temple family had lived in that spot for more than a century.

Boler said her great-great-grandfather Carter Temple was enslaved in Kentucky before moving to Indianapolis in the mid-1800s as a free man. His son, also named Carter, was one of the first Black police officers in Indianapolis. Carter Temple, Jr. built the family home by hand sometime in the late 19th century, Boler said.

Some of the Temple family at their Minerva Street home. (Provided Photo/Cecelia Boler via Mirror Indy)

IU made repeated offers for years to buy the family house. Boler recalled her grandmother and aunts and uncles would often complain, saying that the university was trying to force them out because they were Black.

In 1965, the university offered $23,000 for the Temple’s properties — the house on Minerva and three nearby rentals the family owned.

That offer, which the Temples rejected, marked a tumultuous decade of negotiations with the family matriarch, who, per both documents and her granddaughter, initially had no desire to sell.

In 1976, the university turned to the government, using eminent domain to force the family’s hand. In 1979, Temple received $50,000 for her properties, around $218,000 today.

When the house was bought and scheduled for demolition, Boler’s mom, Lucy, drove from Michigan to Indianapolis with a moving truck. A clawfoot tub and a marble fireplace were among the treasures she hauled back with her.

Lucy Temple and her daughter moved to a house on the north side off 71st Street and Grandview Drive.

That house never felt like home, though.

“Back then, they were so used to being mistreated and things not being fair,” Boler said. “A part of them just accepted it like, ‘Well, what can we do?’”

David Rasheed’s elementary school was replaced by a parking garage

Indiana University started acquiring land en masse in the mid-1960s to build a downtown campus.

Until he was 15, David Rasheed knew nothing other than the westside neighborhoods surrounding Indiana Avenue.

When he was born in 1953, his mother was living in an apartment building that’s now the location of University Hospital.

Rasheed’s grandparents had lived in the area since the early 1920s. He had aunts and uncles and cousins living in the neighborhood, not to mention friends and classmates from Mary E. Cable School 4. Most of his friends had relatives three or four generations back living in the neighborhood.

“That was all the home we knew,” Rasheed said.

Rasheed’s family eventually moved to a house on Minerva Street not too far from the Temple residence when he was 8 or 9.

He saw his neighborhood as a self-sufficient, well-oiled machine. Within the community, there were grocery stores, barber shops and salons, doctors, dentists, restaurants, bars and, of course, the smooth sounds of jazz.

“The neighborhood was fully functioning with everything that you wanted,” Rasheed said.

But today, Rasheed’s old elementary school is the site of a parking garage, his childhood homes were replaced by university buildings and Indiana Avenue has more parking lots than Black-owned businesses.

He and his mother moved out in October 1968 to a house farther west. Their landlord had sold their home three years prior to the university, which was managing it as a rental. But as more and more of their neighbors left, they knew it was time.

“When we left Minerva Street, you could see all the way from North Street to New York Street,” he said, “because all the houses were gone.”

For Rasheed, the sadness was more about leaving the people, his friends he’d grown up with.

Rasheed believes the neighborhood’s decline was, in part, caused by projects that hurt the fabric of the community. Officials championed the construction of Interstate 65, which divided the area with a noisy wide concrete thoroughfare. As the interstate drove out families and the university moved in, the area grew more dilapidated.

Rasheed saw that his neighbors cared for their homes. But at the end of the day, that wasn’t enough.

“That was Indiana University and the state’s excuse to take the neighborhood,” he said. “They could have reinvested in that community and helped bring it back up. But they refused to do that.”

Rasheed has mixed feelings, though, because he’d go on to attend IUPUI on the GI Bill. He enrolled in 1979 because his tuition was free and the campus was local. His wife is also an IUPUI alum; and at Rasheed’s encouragement, two of his children would later attend the university.

While some might expect Rasheed to harbor ill will toward the university because of its development methods, he sees it as the place that gave him and his family an education. While he knows people older than him who harbor resentment towards IUPUI and university administration, Rasheed doesn’t feel bitterly about the past.

“Things happen,” he said. “I think you have to adjust and move on, and try to make something better out of it.”

But it’s still important to him that the next generation understand the history of the vanished westside neighborhood. When he drove his kids to and from class, or while he walked on campus with his wife, Rasheed told them about the place he grew up. He’d point out where he and his family used to live and the places he’d frequent in the neighborhood — now university buildings or parking lots.

“They should know where they came from,” he said.

At Lockefield Gardens, the sounds of children playing filled the air

Lockefield Gardens, the first public housing in Indianapolis, was an important fixture in Indianapolis’ Black community before it was partially torn down, which made way for IUPUI’s expansion.

Leslie Allen has glowing memories of growing up in Lockefield Gardens in the 1960s. She’d rush home from School 4 to play outside with her friends in the Lockefield courtyards.

They’d climb trees and run around until it was time for dinner.

“We didn’t want to go in the house,” said Allen, now 65, “because we was having so much fun with each other.”

Allen is one of thousands of Black Indianapolis residents with a strong tie to Lockefield Gardens, the first public housing complex in the city. The apartment complex was completed in 1938 and replaced dilapidated houses that were classified as slums on the west side.

Allen at Lockefield Gardens. (Provided Photo/Jenna Watson for Mirror Indy)

Allen’s memories of Lockefield are of a village. As kids played outside, their mothers would lean out their apartment windows to chat. They all attended dances on Saturday nights, called the Fun Bowl. Kids of all ages would dance to the Temptations and James Brown while adults chaperoned.

But perhaps most importantly, they took care of each other. Some days, Allen’s mom would cook for all the neighbor kids. The whole complex operated as an extended family.

“We loved one another,” Allen said. “We were taught to love each other.”

Delores Thornton moved into her sister’s apartment in Lockefield in 1967 to help care for her young niece.

As a teenager coming into adulthood, Thornton reveled in being part of a thriving Black community. Though she’d grown up in Riverside, it was the first time she’d been in a place where she was fully surrounded by people who looked like her, part of a community within a community.

Thornton remembers the Lockefield mothers who had fish fries and spaghetti dinners. Neighbors threw parties on Friday nights. Thornton’s older brother played in the Dust Bowl, the basketball tournament that launched careers of NBA and ABA greats such as Oscar Robertson, a Crispus Attucks graduate who grew up in Lockefield.

“It was this wonderful sense of pride of being part of what was Lockefield,” Thornton said. “It was alive.”

But more than three decades after it was founded, Lockefield was a very different place than the one Allen or Thornton had once lived in. By the early 1970s, the complex was in need of repairs and rehabilitation.

In 1971, Lockefield residents voted for a $5.5-million plan to rehab the complex. Families began to move out so that renovations could begin, but in 1975, a federal judge ruled that Lockefield could not be rehabbed because it would lead to continued segregation in both housing and schools.

That left Lockefield at an impasse, and the complex closed in 1976. For years, the apartments sat, vacant and decaying. In early 1983, historian Glory-June Greiff, along with local preservation groups, started working to save Lockefield.

“This was a wonderful place to live,” Greiff said. “It was not a slum. It was not terrible. It was not poor housing.”

For six months, Greiff lived and breathed Lockefield Gardens. She held press conferences to convince city and university leaders to save the building. She went on local TV and radio programs to make the case for preserving Lockefield.

The preservationists even took on renovations. Greiff and a group who called themselves the “Lockefield Guardians Coalition” leased an apartment in the complex for $1 a month. With the support of local unions, they made cosmetic repairs and held an open house so community members could see a glimpse of Lockefield’s past and a potential future.

But their efforts ultimately didn’t pan out, because the city and IU had already agreed to raze most of Lockefield. After months of petitioning — and years of uncertainty for Lockefield residents — the majority of the complex’s buildings were demolished in July 1983.

Seven buildings — the ones along Blake Street — remained and were added to the National Register of Historic Landmarks. In 1986, the IU Foundation closed on the purchase of 7.5 acres of the westernmost portion of Lockefield, which would later become University Boulevard and medical buildings.

As for the rest of the complex, the city selected a local developer to build new housing and rehab Lockefield’s existing buildings. The renovated Lockefield opened in the fall of 1987 and aimed to attract student tenants rather than families. The developer added 11 new apartment buildings, which today house college students and hospital employees.

On the day most of Lockefield was torn down, Allen remembers former residents gathering in dismay to watch.

Residents hugged each other tearfully as the home they’d once known fell to the wrecking ball.

“It was like a funeral,” Allen said.

Allen’s family apartment was in one of the Lockefield buildings that was preserved and remodeled. As she walked around the courtyards she once played in and admired the trees she used to climb, she could almost hear the joyful cries of children.

But that day, Lockefield Gardens was silent apart from the sound of traffic on the busy University Boulevard.

Claire Rafford covers higher education for Mirror Indy in partnership with Open Campus. Contact Claire at claire.rafford@mirrorindy.org or on social media @clairerafford.