Religion and Race

Race has been a public issue in Indianapolis from the city’s earliest years. Numerous state laws restricted the rights of African Americans, starting with legislation in the early 1800s that prohibited them from testifying in court and outlawed marriage between Black and white people. More severe laws followed, including an 1831 bill requiring that Black individuals migrating to the state post bond. The Indiana Constitution of 1851 prohibited Black individuals from migrating to the state altogether and fined anyone caught employing Black migrants. Despite these antebellum legal constraints, Black residents in Indianapolis numbered 498 in 1860, about 3 percent of the total population.

The racial intolerance characteristic of Indianapolis from its earliest days stemmed in part from the city’s above-average proportion of white southerners compared to other midwestern areas. It also reflected the city’s overwhelmingly Protestant composition. Consequently, racial and religious exclusivity prevailed in Indianapolis.

Systematically separated from the larger context of Indianapolis, Black residents created social and institutional worlds of their own. Black churches, among the first institutions to form, became centers of Black social organization. For example, the African Methodist Episcopal congregations responded to the exclusion of Black children from public schools by founding their own schools in the 1850s. The AME church simultaneously played a leading role in organizing challenges to the restrictive legal status of black residents across the state.

The issue of race assumed greater importance for Indianapolis as the North-South confrontation over slavery edged closer to war. Routine partisan strife between Indianapolis Republicans and Democrats increased as they were forced to deal directly with the slavery issue. Republican loyalties were with Lincoln and the Union. Some Democrats, however, sympathized with the South. Indiana Democrats serving in the U.S. Congress, for instance, voted with the South on every issue related to slavery. When war began in 1861, local Democrats briefly pledged their fealty to the Union’s war effort but soon resumed their oppositional stance. Through it all, white churches were largely silent.

With emancipation came a large influx of Black people into Indianapolis, the number reaching close to 16,000 by the end of the century, or 9.4 percent of the population. The new arrivals, often destitute, received food, clothing, and shelter from Black churches. Among whites, the influx of Black residents generated mostly a series of new legislative initiatives on race. Some of this legislation attempted to ease restrictions on African Americans’ rights, but most of it sought to strengthen restrictions or impose new ones. One piece of postbellum legislation favoring Black rights was an 1885 Civil Rights Act passed by the Indiana General Assembly which prohibited discrimination in hotels, restaurants, places of amusement, and public transportation. The law, however, was rarely enforced. Some local Black ministers played important roles in the legal battle for Black rights in the latter 1800s. For example, the pastor of Second Baptist Church organized Black resistance to discriminatory public policies and actively mobilized Black residents into the Republican party.

In the early 1900s, Indianapolis’ white Protestant homogeneity gradually but discernibly declined as Roman Catholics, Jews, and Blacks arrived in larger numbers. This increasing diversity generated significant white Protestant hostility. The Ku Klux Klan was formed in Indiana in 1920 and achieved state and local political power by the mid-1920s through a rhetoric hostile to Catholics, Jews, immigrants, and Blacks. The Klan’s active membership was large, but its support from nonmembers was even larger, with many Protestant denominations maintaining silence and numerous individual ministers vocally supporting the Klan. Although the Protestant Episcopal Diocese of Indianapolis denounced the Klan, most formal opposition to the Klan derived from Roman Catholic, Black Protestant, and a few other nonchurch sources. Among the more prominent opponents were Catholic and Black newspapers such as the Indiana Catholic and Record and the Indianapolis Freeman, although neither Roman Catholics nor Blacks universally opposed the Klan. Some Black clergymen collaborated directly with the KKK, while many others simply withheld criticism of it. In both cases, identification with the Klan’s Protestantism and reliance on Klan-infiltrated public institutions were factors in this Black support.

The Klan’s emergence was only one indicator of white resistance to the changing demographic composition of Indianapolis. The 1920s witnessed significant formalization of racial segregation in the city. Official school policies separated elementary school students into single-race schools, and the city established a Black high school, Crispus Attucks, for all Black secondary students. Legal and illegal efforts to prevent Black residents from purchasing homes within white neighborhoods strengthened existing patterns of residential segregation. At the same time, numerous public accommodations, including hospitals, hotels, restaurants, and recreation facilities, denied service to Black people, openly flouting the 1885 law prohibiting such discrimination.

By the late 1920s, the Klan had lost political strength, though its decline resulted more from internal scandal than from the strength of forces opposing racism. Nevertheless, the beginnings of organized, interracial, religious resistance to discrimination in Indianapolis can be traced to this decade. The Church Federation of Greater Indianapolis, a Protestant council founded in 1912, established an auxiliary committee on race relations in 1920 and mandated it to report back on housing needs and employment discrimination. The five Black residents who served on the 35-member committee and the Black ministers brought in to address it represented the first serious involvement by African Americans in the federation’s activities. The primary results of the committee’s work during the 1920s were the appointment of Black members to the federation’s principal committees and the development of pulpit exchanges between Black and white churches, especially on one Sunday each year designated as Race Relations Sunday.

During the 1930s the federation continued serving as a politically moderate clearinghouse on race, urging the end of discrimination in the city. Meanwhile, more aggressive antidiscrimination action was being taken in the Black community. With Black economic and job security most adversely affected by the Great Depression, Black civic leaders launched boycotts against businesses that refused to hire African Americans, a strategy supported within Black church circles such as the Baptist Ministerial Alliance.

Interracial and interreligious organizational efforts against discrimination gained momentum throughout the 1940s. The Indianapolis Citizen’s Council, formed with Church Federation assistance in 1943, included participation from the Indianapolis Catholic Diocese and the Jewish Federation. The same year, a local branch of the National Conference of Christians and Jews was organized. Interreligious cooperation on race issues was well established by this point, producing additional groups for an antidiscrimination consensus with each decade. By the 1950s, for example, the Roman Catholic Inter-Racial Council and the Jewish Community Relations Council were working alongside the Church Federation, jointly sponsoring a conference on religion and race. Also, the Indiana Interreligious Commission on Human Equality emerged in the 1960s as an organization comprised of Jewish, Catholic, Baha’i, Muslim, Unitarian Universalist, and Protestant supporters. The Indianapolis City Council established a Human Rights Commission in 1952-1953 to advise government officials and educate citizens about race relations and issues.

Despite this activity, discrimination proved stubborn. The General Assembly finally passed a bill ending legal segregation in 1949, although implementation and enforcement proceeded slowly. From the perspective of some Black religious leaders, the timidness of white religious leadership contributed to the slow pace of progress. By the 1960s most Black Protestants had concluded that the antidiscrimination activities of groups like the Church Federation were insignificant. The Black community therefore invested their energies in their own organizational structures. The Indiana Christian Leadership Conference, formed in 1969, became a prominent Black political voice in Indianapolis. Black ministerial groups like the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance and Concerned Clergy also became outlets for political expression.

The 1960s produced federal antidiscrimination laws, but compliance in Indianapolis was halting. It took a federal court order in the early 1970s to force a systematic approach to public school desegregation in Indianapolis. The goals remained unfulfilled in the 1990s. Desegregation of neighborhoods and public facilities was carried out more successfully, although enduring pockets of resistance have required continued attention. Police-community relations issues became prominent in the 1970s and worsened with each decade and each new police action shooting of Black residents. Throughout Indianapolis’ history, racism has been a persistent issue. Although the city’s religious community has not been as persistent in responding to it, it has produced leadership important to the racial progress which has been achieved.

*Note: This entry is from the original print edition of the Encyclopedia of Indianapolis (1994). We are currently seeking an individual with knowledge of this topic to update this entry.