COLUMBUS, Ind. — Blacks were relegated to the balcony at The Crump Theatre in Columbus. Most restaurants refused to serve them.
Blacks struggled to get home loans, or to live in areas dominated for decades by white residents. Black residents didn’t even have a local place to get their hair cut, and subsequently had to drive to Indianapolis. Ironically, even Black-owned salons for years were limited to white customers because whites didn’t want to frequent a business that also served Blacks.
Some of those facts were part of a virtual discussion “Black History in Columbus Over the Last 40-Plus Years” Monday evening on the Facebook page for NAACP Columbus/Bartholomew. Bishop Charles Sims moderated the presentation at a Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp. conference room with former Cummins Inc. executives Donald Trapp and Brenda Pitts. Pitts also outlined some of her recollections during a slightly similar discussion last summer initiated by the Bartholomew County Public Library.
Many of the memories recounted Monday were painful ones amid the backdrop and strain of the Civil Rights movement. Trapp referenced at least two Ku Klux Klan reported acts soon after he arrived here in 1973. That included one incident in October 1976 when racial slurs such as “Go back to Africa” were spray painted on a Black lodge heavily vandalized and left with human feces inside. Klan literature had been found there earlier.
Then, in April 1977, robed members of the Indiana Ku Klux Klan paraded around the Bartholomew County Courthouse and passed out pamphlets, according to The Republic.
Sims said that history reminded him of a white supremacy hate group that distributed its information along Washington Street in 2017. Panelists acknowledged that systemic racism is still present locally.
Trapp first worked at Irwin Management Co., under the influence of J. Irwin Miller, the leader of then-Cummins Engine Co. and a man who was actively recruiting, hiring and promoting Black workers more than 50 years ago. In fact, Miller was among the organizers of the 1963 March on Washington led by Martin Luther King Jr.
Trapp said Miller’s respect for all ethnicities “was part of the ethos. It was in the air. You just didn’t (racially) discriminate.”
Pitts recalled that, when one Black family struggled to move out of a poor Black neighborhood downtown because banks refused to give loans, Miller himself loaned the family the money.
Regarding racial progress, all three speakers mentioned elements such as the African American Fund, supporting a variety of events supporting the Black community.
For more on this story, see Thursday’s Republic.
