The NAACP Comes to Indianapolis

By nineteen ten, the Black population of Indianapolis had grown from nine thousand one hundred thirty-three in eighteen ninety to twenty-one thousand eight hundred sixteen. The growth brought pressure: more competition for housing in the neighborhoods where Black residents were permitted to live, more encounters with employers who would not hire, more encounters with institutions that required separate waiting rooms, separate schools, separate everything.

Mary Cable organized the Indianapolis branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in nineteen twelve, three years after the national organization was founded. She was president of the Colored Women's Civic Club, and the branch she assembled had all women officers. After thirteen months, Cable and the other women asked the men to join the leadership, because the men had more time. The branch grew.

By the nineteen twenties it had become the organizational spine of Indianapolis's civil rights resistance. When D. C. Stephenson's Klan was at the height of its power, controlling city hall and the school board and the state legislature, the Indianapolis NAACP was among the institutions directly opposing it. They challenged school segregation, fought lynching, took cases through the courts, and worked the same system Stephenson was working, from the other side.

Madam C. J. Walker had donated money to the national NAACP before her death in nineteen nineteen. Freeman Briley Ransom, the Walker Company's attorney, was active in the branch's legal work. The network of Indiana Avenue, Ransom Place, the Walker Company, and the NAACP was not a coincidence. It was the same community, organized in overlapping ways, for the same purpose: to build something durable in a city that often tried to prevent it.