Timeline of Wealth & Opportunity in Indianapolis
This timeline highlights selected moments, policies, programs, and community-led efforts that shaped Black wealth creation in Indianapolis over time.
It is not intended to be a comprehensive history. Rather, it is a tool for learning and reflection, designed to help City staff, residents, and other visitors consider how past decisions influenced access to wealth and opportunity, and how that history can inform present-day action.
Post Civil War Early 20th Century
1865-1930
After the Civil War, Black Hoosiers in Indianapolis faced severe social and economic barriers but built strong, self-sufficient communities. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, African Americans fleeing Jim Crow carved out neighborhoods, founding churches, businesses, and social groups that anchored community life.
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1910
Despite discrimination, Black educators, doctors, and entrepreneurs became leaders and fostered resilience.
African Americans faced steep wealth barriers, including segregation, limited capital, and KKK hostility.
In the 1910s–20s, many white Indianapolis neighborhoods used covenants and intimidation to block Black homebuyers.
1920
Families passed homes down when mortgages were unavailable, and mutual aid societies pooled resources to support Black businesses and homebuyers.
Areas like Indiana Avenue blossomed into a bustling Black commercial district—often called Indianapolis’s “Black Wall Street”—filled with Black-owned shops, jazz clubs, and entrepreneurship centered around icons like the Madam C.J. Walker Theatre.
1930
In 1937, about 85% of Indianapolis neighborhoods were labeled “declining” (yellow) or “hazardous” (red), sidelining most of the city—especially Black communities—from FHA-insured lending and credit. As shown in Mapping Inequality: Many Black families had to buy on contract or accept high-interest loans.
The Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) created “residential security” maps grading neighborhoods for mortgage risk. Black and integrated areas were marked “hazardous,” cutting them off from financial tools and equity opportunities.
Predatory real estate practices like blockbusting — where speculators panicked white owners into selling low, then resold at inflated prices to Black buyers — extracted wealth from those striving for homeownership.
Mid 20th Century to Today
1940-Current
As Black Indianapolis residents worked to overcome housing
discrimination, another wave of disruption arrived — this time
through the bulldozers of urban renewal and the ballot boxes of
political restructuring. Urban renewal is often framed as
revitalization — but for Black communities in Indianapolis, it
meant uprooting and loss. Beginning in the mid-20th century,
city-led redevelopment projects displaced thousands of Black
residents, disrupted thriving neighborhoods, and dismantled
foundational engines of community wealth.
1940
From the late 1800s through the mid-20th century, the Avenue was a hub for Black enterprise: a place where jazz clubs, churches, restaurants, professional offices, and small businesses flourished.
In Martindale-Brightwood, a historically Black neighborhood, the American Lead Smelter began spewing toxic particles onto nearby homes and yards as the company recycled car batteries and industrial waste.
1950
White residents— motivated by resistance to racial integration— began leaving older Indianapolis neighborhoods for newly built suburbs or “included towns” in Marion County.
Federal highway funding gave the City of Indianapolis the tools to bulldoze the near-west side. The construction of Interstates 65 and 70 carved directly through redlined Black neighborhoods, displacing an estimated 17,000 residents and demolishing more than 8,000 homes and buildings.
1960
Beginning in the late 1960s, Indiana University and Purdue University, in partnership with city officials, began acquiring land along Indiana Avenue for campus development. Around 300 acres — much of it Black-owned — was purchased or seized through eminent domain, often at below-market prices.
By the 1960s, over 30% of Marion County’s workforce was employed in manufacturing, and for the first time, a significant number of Black residents accessed jobs with steady wages, union protections, and a path to the middle class.
Industrial employers began shutting down or relocating to suburban and sunbelt regions. Entire plants closed or downsized, and the union jobs that had supported Black workers vanished.
Black residents who remained were left with
declining property values, deteriorating
infrastructure, and diminishing access to
essential services. For many, this wasn’t just a
story of economic decline — it was about
being rooted in neighborhoods from which opportunity had been stripped away.
Black upward mobility began to vanish. Black workers, often the last hired and first fired, were hit especially hard. For many Black households,
the sudden loss of income meant not just
financial strain, but the unraveling of hard-won
economic security — homeownership became
unsustainable, savings evaporated, and college
dreams were delayed or abandoned.
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1970
The consolidation of Indianapolis’s city
government with surrounding Marion
County absorbed mostly white suburban
areas into the city, instantly dropping the
percentage of Black residents from about
27% to 17 or 18%. The merger increased accessibility of city resources--yet those
resources were not equitably distributed.
Infrastructure, business subsidies, and public investment flowed into downtown and suburban neighborhoods — while areas like the near-east and near-westsides, home to many Black residents, experienced chronic neglect and underinvestment. Schools, roads, and public services in historically Black neighborhoods continued to deteriorate.
In the early 1970s, after Unigov diluted
Black voting power, local leaders fought
back. Lawsuits and organizing led to the
creation of single member districts in
1973, which significantly improved Black
representation on the City-County Council.
1980
The new jobs that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s were mostly in the service sector: retail, hospitality, and healthcare. These positions typically paid less, lacked
union protections, and offered little opportunity for long-term advancement. As wages fell and job security
weakened, fewer Black families could afford to maintain their homes or plan
for the future. By the early 1980s, Black unemployment in Indianapolis had soared
into the double digits — far exceeding white unemployment rates.
Today
The 2008 subprime lending crisis, for example, disproportionately saddled
Black homeowners with high-risk mortgages, stripping away hard earned equity and triggering waves of
foreclosure in neighborhoods already
strained by decades of systemic harm. These weren’t isolated events —
they were the continuation of a familiar pattern: a city where Black residents have repeatedly been denied full access to economic systems and left to absorb
the fallout when those systems fail.
In 2023, the City County Council
passed a formal resolution recognizing the lasting impact of redlining and
pledging a commitment to targeted, equity driven investment
That same year, the City launched Vacant to Vibrant, a strategy focused on turning long-vacant lots — many in formerly redlined neighborhoods — into
housing and green spaces through
community partnerships
The City has supported new mixed-income developments near
transit, revised zoning codes to allow for more housing diversity, and expanded emergency rental assistance —
including more than $100 million in aid through the IndyRent program during
the COVID-19 crisis
Understanding this history is one part of understanding how the City can better support opportunity today.