Correction: Exchange-Indianapolis History Project story

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) - In an Aug. 3 story about an Indianapolis bicentennial project that The Associated Press retransmitted, the Indianapolis Star misidentified the source of funding for the Indiana Historical Society project. It was Lilly Endowment, not Lilly Foundation.

A corrected version of the story is below:

Indianapolis bicentennial project seeks unseen documents

BICENTENNIAL SEARCH: The Indiana Historical Society is collecting documents from Hoosiers ahead of an exhibit and online archive for Indianapolis' bicentennial.

This is an Indiana Exchange story shared by The Indianapolis Star

By LONDON GIBSON

The Indianapolis Star

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) - In her office, Jordan Ryan sifted through hundreds of photographs, house documents and blueprints filed away in manila folders and off-white boxes. She was looking through a stack of photographs of buildings she had never seen.

"This is going to change the neighborhood," she said, setting down an old photograph of one building whose architectural style would later usher in changes to the southeast Indianapolis Norwood neighborhood.

Ryan soon will have to decide which of these photographs - if any - will be used to tell Indianapolis' story in an exhibit honoring the city's bicentennial next year. For more than a year and a half, Ryan has been collecting materials for the exhibit and an accompanying online archive and storing them at the Indiana Historical Society, where she works as an archivist.

She has pulled hundreds of thousands of documents already, from institutions and personal submissions alike. They've been drawn from libraries and museums, unearthed from basements and dragged out of garages. They capture the city's triumphant highs as well as its disturbing lows.

The submissions include family documents but also, as examples, 1960s labor union newsletters and the 200-year-old business ledger of John McCormick, one of the city's first settlers. Anybody can donate or loan materials, and Ryan said the team has found some gems from residents who have offered their family histories.

"We're sort of at a wealth of resources," Ryan said. "It's really a treasure trove because most major U.S. cities do have a city archive when we don't."

Many metropolitan governments, especially those in capital cities, keep city records from various agencies in a centralized, city-maintained archive.

Because Indianapolis doesn't have a city archive, its historical documents are spread out among various agencies, museums, libraries and private collections that all have their own focus. This poses an obstacle for Ryan as she attempts to tell a complete story of the city.

And, as is the nature of history, the stories of underrepresented voices are even more difficult to track down.

"As one can assume, many types of materials have slipped through the cracks," Ryan said.

Looking for more information on minority communities, the historical society issued a public call-out this year for personal contributions to the bicentennial exhibit and free digital archive.

Ryan set off contacting neighborhood associations and community groups - anyone who could help her tell Indianapolis' histories of gentrification, redlining, disinvestment and white flight, among other issues.

Some people Ryan tracked down personally. Others, like Cynthia Hooks, found her.

Hooks and her aunt were sitting at the kitchen table last year when they found original documents from the sale of her grandmother's house, dating back to the 1800s and still lettered in the original spiky, calligraphic handwriting.

Piece by piece, the documents would later change the way she viewed the house she had just inherited and the grandmother she had inherited it from. Within those documents would come a newfound sense of pride.

"It just all came together," Hooks said. "It was an emotional moment."

At the advice of a friend, Hooks took the documents to Ryan in May. Ryan's research found the home had hosted a women's literary and empowerment club before Hooks' grandfather bought the home in the 1930s.

Hooks was also impressed to hear her grandfather had been able to buy the home in the Kennedy-King neighborhood, with cash, at the height of a decade wracked with racial and financial tension.

"For an African-American family to be able to, in the middle of the Depression, to be able to pay cash for a home," Hooks said. "It was just a sense of pride and just the legacy that my grandmother and grandfather have left behind."

Hooks' grandfather died when he was very young, and her grandmother, Amanda Fisher, raised their eight children alone as a working mother. She struggled, Hooks said, but none of her children felt poor, and they always tried to help others in the community.

"Everybody knew Mrs. Fisher," Hooks said, laughing. "The home was always used as a safe place and a place of rest and a place of prayer. Even now when I go home ... I feel that presence. I feel that calming spirit."

It's stories like Hooks' grandmother's that Ryan wants to tell.

"I feel this profound sense of duty as an outreach archivist that I need to help uncover these underrepresented histories," Ryan said. "If I don't provide material for all sides of the argument, I'm not being a good archivist."

Ryan also has a separate collection initiative for documents related to LGBTQ history in Indianapolis and said she recently acquired images from Low Pone, an Indianapolis drag party. She also is looking for materials related to working-class history and the struggles of laborers in Indianapolis.

Not every submission makes it in the online archive, but Ryan estimates that thousands of images have been digitized so far and will be uploaded in the coming months.

The scope of the Indianapolis story is large, said Danny Gonzales, director of exhibits research for the historical society, but this just makes telling an honest story of the city's history all that more important.

"At the end of the day, this is about serving our community," Gonzales said. "And we can't do that effectively if people come to this institution and don't hear their stories and can't look at collections that reflect their experiences and their backgrounds."

Scholars don't typically write about Indianapolis, Ryan said, because the city isn't central to urban or Midwestern history. She said she hopes this archive helps to change that.

"In some ways, we are playing catch-up," Ryan said. "We tend to not be one of those cities that historians write about. So I'm hoping that by providing new archival materials we can sort of enter that academic and scholarship narrative, too."

For this collection, Ryan hired part-time staffers with funding from a Lilly Endowment grant. The staffers sort, archive and digitize the thousands of materials Ryan brings in. Ryan spends most of her time promoting the collections and trying to draw in even more artifacts.

Ryan has been working closely with the Department of Metropolitan Development and the geographic information system department. Deputy Mayor Jeff Bennett played a major role in connecting her to these agencies, who then supplied archival city planning maps and documents for the bicentennial exhibit.

"The bicentennial gives us a chance as a community to look back at the city over 200 years of history and also enables us to look forward to the Indianapolis of tomorrow," Bennett said. "The ability to have material available, historical material available, for research, for storytelling, for documentation, is vitally important for any city."

The historical society's bicentennial exhibit will run September 2020 to January 2022, but the online archive is a permanent fixture. Multiple perspectives of history - particularly those underrepresented - are important for people to have access to, said Jody Blankenship, historical society president and CEO.

"I think when you help people understand complexity by understanding different perspectives, how something was viewed from all these different ways, you help people understand the nuances," Blankenship said. "And ideally, what you do is you build people's capacity for tolerance and empathy."

Hooks is president of the Kennedy-King Neighborhood Association and said she remembers a time when "if you were going to Downtown Indianapolis, you would not come down College Avenue."

In the past nine years since she inherited her grandmother's house, however, she said she has seen the neighborhood transform. And, Hooks said, after decades of gentrification in the area, Kennedy-King's roots are finally going to be recognized - and her house is part of that.

"A lot of people living there now don't have a clue about the history. They don't remember what it was like," Hooks said. "I remember being a little girl, and it was beautiful."

Hooks' home documents will be included in the online bicentennial archive, honoring a legacy of almost 100 years that the house has been in her family. This "speaks volumes," Hooks said, because you don't always see black families represented this way.

"Oftentimes, when you hear of historical homes and the history of Indianapolis, you don't hear about the working-class families that have really been the backbone of the city. ... You don't hear about single black moms with eight kids that held it together after being widowed," Hooks said. "It means everything to me."

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Source: The Indianapolis Star