When I visited Evansville, Indiana, on a bright summer day in 2021, its revived waterfront and fabulous murals captivated me. Since then, I delved into Timothy Egan’s book about the Midwestern Klan, where I discovered that Evansville was a hotbed for KKK activity in the 1920s. Unlike the Klan that terrorized the South during Reconstruction, its second wave looked beyond Blacks to hate and harass. It was nativist, focused on driving out Catholics and first-generation immigrants, as well as Jews—together with Blacks they’d always targeted, they manufactured a much wider target for hate. It’s important to note that Blacks had been unwelcome in Indiana since its first Constitution specified, “No negro or mulatto shall come into, or settle in the State, after the adoption of this Constitution.” Intrigued by Indiana’s history of trying to maintain a WASP state (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant), I decided the Evansville African American Museum would be a vital stop. The museum sits in a neighborhood that’s been called Baptisttown since the 1800s, in a building dating back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal Era. Constructed in 1938, it narrowly avoided demolition in the 1990s and opened as a cultural institution in 2007. Its story as compelling as those it narrates.Evansville in the New Deal EraBy the turn of the (last) century, 54 percent of Evansville’s Black citizens lived in Baptisstown, and by WWI, the neighborhood became overcrowded to where a third of its residents had no access to sewage systems. Think for one second how miserable that must have been on a hot summer’s day (any day for that matter). Racial segregation in Evansville was of course rooted in Indiana’s Constitutional “Black Laws” but it was later exacerbated by racial restrictive covenants known as “deed restrictions” banning Blacks from living or owning property in most parts of the city. The use of deed restrictions were widespread throughout the country, with more cities adopting them than not. Although the Supreme Court ruled the covenants unenforceable in 1948, it took the Fair Housing Act of 1968 to outlaw them. But Indiana’s segregation predated deed restrictions. By the time the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) analyzed Evansville neighborhoods in 1937, segregation was well-entrenched: 90% of Evansville's Black population lived in one of four neighborhoods. The HOLC outlined those four neighborhoods in red on the maps that they provided to lenders and insurance companies to use in deciding whether to do business in an area. Most companies avoided “redlined” neighborhoods, but if they did business there, it would be at a higher interest rate or insurance premium than offered elsewhere.As I hinted earlier, FDR’s Public Works Administration (PWA) tried to ameliorate the nation’s Depression-induced housing crisis by building 51 projects in 31 cities (seven were in Ohio River cities, including Evansville). The PWA was not focused on desegregation. It followed a “neighborhood composition rule,” meaning PWA housing projects should reflect the previous racial composition of their neighborhoods. Legal scholars note that this violated African Americans’ constitutional rights, but that was a battle for another day. To Evansville’s credit, local leaders resisted efforts to place the housing project outside the city limits, or to use the PWA to clear the neighborhood for white residents, as had happened in PWA communities elsewhere, despite the guidelines.Evansville is in the heart of Lincoln Country, so the community’s name, Lincoln Gardens, resonated. For about $1m, Lincoln Gardens housed roughly 500 residents in 16 buildings of 182 low-cost apartments. It was the second PWA community to be built in the country.First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt brought a touch of celebrity to Lincoln Gardens when she visited Baptisttown in November, 1937. Here’s an excerpt from her “My Day” newspaper column:First we went to lay a wreath on the tomb of Private Gresham, who was the first solider killed overseas during the World War. Then to look at the slum clearance project in the colored section of the City, which is evidently a matter of great pride to the Mayor. He is very happy that this undesirable section from the point of view of housing, has been wiped out. He told me that the new houses would rent at approximately the same amount per room as the old ones which had been extremely high considering what they were. That is one point in any slum clearance project which has to be watched, for there is no use in providing new housing at a cost beyond the incomes of the former residents of the neighborhood.As much as I love Eleanor, her fusty descriptions are cringy.Visiting the MuseumOn a balmy late-April morning, Ms. Janice Hale took me for a personal tour of the museum. She had lived in Lincoln Gardens with her mother and sister in the sixties, so her memories and reflections resonated ...
