The Southside U.S. Colored Troop Coalition

Posted in September 2024

Community Revival Through Descendant Voices: The Southside U.S. Colored Troop Coalition (USCTC) is a community-based archive with a cultural heritage development and sustainability mandate. We are a conduit for cultural conservation on behalf of African American families located in the southeast quadrant of Indianapolis. Our goal is systems change and to create holistic methods for heritage preservation that allow us to leverage the past in order to protect the future.

We were founded in 2021 by the descendants of the US Colored Troops, the first African American soldiers in the United States during the Civil War. The mission of the Southside USCT Coalition is to protect, uplift and revitalize the communities, families and stories of Indiana’s 28th Regiment of the US Colored Troops (1863–65) and the newly emancipated African Americans who moved into their neighborhoods for protection during the Reconstruction Period (1865–77). The story of the Indiana US Colored Troops, as one of only five regiments to participate in what is not celebrated as Juneteenth, solidifies a new national military history for Indianapolis to be proud of.

Six neighborhoods and over 200 descendant families have been identified in the Southeast quadrant of Indianapolis. Many of them still live on the lots their ancestors purchased over 190 years ago, making them some of the oldest African American communities in the Mid-Western United States. Because of the stability of our community, the materials in our archive date back to the 1830s and include manumission papers, photographs, pension documents, property records, family papers including letters and diaries, church congregation records, uniforms, autobiographies, artworks and other artifacts. The USCT descendants have remembered themselves, and this history can be leveraged to their benefit.

The Southside Heritage Preservation Initiative, a program of the Southside U.S. Colored Troop Coalition, has created opportunities for the descendants of the US Colored Troops to preserve and share the narrative of their community on their own terms. We are also training the descendant families to use these stories to re-contextualize the history of Indianapolis as a quilt-work of cultures. When we began this program, there was no history of our neighborhood in the Indiana state archives that uplifted our story. We have worked to recover our history locally and nationally over the last four years, and we have created multilevel partnerships with over twenty non-profit organizations locally to further our impact. By paying equitable wages, providing access to community resources and educational services for staff and descendants as part of the preservation program, we feel that our offerings are in alignment with the values of our communities. Through expanded partnerships locally and nationally, we are also in the process of facilitating the repair of homes and church buildings, business development programs and creating historic and tax credit districts in order to stabilize our neighborhood for the next generations.

One of our most fascinating finds over over the last several years while working on this project, was recovered by Indianapolis historian Sampson Levingston. It was learning of the existence of a U.S. Colored Troop witness tree located on the property of Arthur’s Music Store at the intersection Shelby Street and Hosbrook Avenue in the Fountain Square neighborhood. A witness tree is an American battlefield practice, where soldiers sometimes marked historic events with the planting of a new tree that would live alongside the hallowed ground, encouraging soldiers, their family and the public to remember what happened here. Our tree is a pin oak. Non-native to Indiana, it had to be planted, cared for and maintained. It is 160 years old and it has been struck by lightning twice. According to the African American Civil War Memorial Museum, it may be the only USCT Witness Tree in the U.S. This location alone will create a site of memory in the Southeast quadrant that would bring in visitors from across the United States. Through this lens, community-based archives and heritage preservation can be redefined as a collection of historic community assets that harness potential for economic development opportunities that transform our city from the inside out.

As part of the recovery process, we have to emphasize the injustice that has been centered in our community. As it is in many Black communities in the United States, normally we are framed by our deficits. Displacement, environmental contamination, legacies of racial violence in Southeast Indianapolis have altered the way that our stories are told. The Ku Klux Klan rose again in the United States in the early 1910s, and their revival happened within our boundaries. Led by Grand Dragon DC Stephenson, the KKK was headquartered in Irvington only one mile from our community and the funds raised by the organization supported the election of politicians and other officials who had significant influence on neighborhoods throughout Indianapolis. By 1923, there were over 250,000 Klansmen in Indianapolis alone, surrounding almost every African American neighborhood in the city.

In Norwood and Barrington, we were surrounded by Klan cells on all sides: Irvington, Beech Grove, Christian Park and Fountain Square, the home of the historic U.S. Colored Troop fort, Camp Fremont. In 1927, the entirety of the Mayor’s office was removed from power because of their connection with the KKK. However, as a city, we are still dealing with the long term impacts of this campaign; Indianapolis Public Schools were segregated and defunded, redlining was imposed on black and allied neighborhoods and the archives in the state of Indiana were formalized, leaving the history of the U.S. Colored Troops and their legacies out. The past reverberates into the present.

In spite of the prominence of this narrative, upon being asked what the experience of growing up in our community in the 1920s was like, Ms Flinora Frazier, a 95 year old community memory keeper, said: “I never even knew they were out there. I have never been anything but safe in Norwood.” This short moment in our history has dominated the narratives of place here, denying us a much longer, multilayered story of self-determination, comradery, legacy and place. The Southeast quadrant was built by people of all backgrounds and we do our best to tell these stories about our indigenous neighbors, the LeNape, who built our orchards, the staunch abolitionists who helped us build and protect our communities, and the new Latinx community that provides our community with ever growing stories to tell.

Corrective history allows us to move past the legacies of White Supremacy in Southeast Indianapolis and create a story of collaboration, agency and repair that will help redefine our city. We are able to expand the idea of what Indianapolis has been and, in return, what it can be. We need to know more about who we are and what we’ve done, especially in the African American community, where we have been stripped of land, stories and memories. This blank space allows us the flexibility to retell our legacy in imaginative and bold ways, creating new models for practitioners and researchers to recover stories in our city and nationally. We are the story of grit and resilience, of making a way out of no way and remaining kind in the midst of it. We take care of ourselves and our communities, we continue to build in the face of resistance, and we will continue to expand here as long as it is within our power.

For the first time, the descendants of the Southside U.S. Colored Troops feel seen by their city because of how the archives have been activated to protect their community. When the Community Justice Campus, a 160 acre, $1 billion jail complex, opened in Norwood, we felt like we had been overlooked; there was nothing left to fight for. The city placed a looming symbol of their oversight on our northern horizon, a jail that we will have to look at for the next 60 years. But as the new city morgue was announced within our boundaries, we were able to bond together and create change where we are and we fought back. As a result, the property will become a 40 acre Black arts and heritage park , something our community desperately dreamed of. We know that our words, heritage, and stories can be leveraged to create long-needed change in our community. Through recording the descendant’s oral histories, we have been able to rebuild an old story and use it to plan our futures.

We have been able to reframe our story. With our communities shifting around us, we have worked to advocate for ourselves using the skills we have available. Our first major victory was in February 2022 with the cancellation of the new City Morgue in Norwood ; the 40 acre property was donated to IndyParks for redevelopment. Since then, we have secured repairs, redesigns and redevelopment of three other park facilities in the Southeast quadrant: Pride Park (Norwood), Babe Denny Park, and Strader Park (Barrington), allowing us to begin creating a cohesive story across the neighborhoods.

According to Southsider and USCT Historian Andrew Bowman, 96, “…the Troops, being able to have independence of their own and being independent of [Indianapolis], they understood and had actually fought. They understood collective bargaining and collective work together, so that’s how they managed to help each other. The Colored Troops came, they needed someplace to stay…you see what happens with the other [Black] neighborhoods [in the city], and so you move out here…you’re going to make your future, and you get to make it [from] what you’re made of at the start.”

What we were made of at the start was remarkable, what we have been able to maintain is unheard of and where we go from here will be transformative for us all.

Bibliography

• Bergis Jules, Architecting Sustainable Futures: Exploring Funding Models in Community-Based Archives, 2019. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mPAHOagseUoQ7dSYytM0ZosvvvEFLz6u/view
• Shift Collective, Getting Beyond Surviving to Thriving: Architecting Sustainable Futures at 5 Years — A Celebration, Assessment, and Agenda Setting Convening for Community-Based Archives, https://medium.com/community-archives/report-moving-beyond-surviving-to-thriving-129c2c4dabc5
• Frank Smith Interview, Southside USCTC Oral History Collection, Recorded 2024, Unpublished.
• David Pickard. “Honoring an Indianapolis Community’s Past by Facilitating a Resident-Driven Plan for the Future.” IFF. July 29 2024. https://iff.org/facilitating-a-resident-driven-plan-for-community-development-indianapolis-norwood-neighborhood/
• Norwood Family Center Feasibility Analysis.” IFF, Compiled 2024, Unpublished.
• Drenon, Brandon and Ko Lin Cheng. “We’ve Lost So Much: Norwood Residents defend area from city encroachment, gentrification” Indy Star. March 15, 2022.
• Drenon, Brandon. “City planned morgue in historic Norwood neighborhood. Then officials heard from residents.” Indy Star. March 14, 2022.
• https://www.indystar.com/story/news/2021/10/14/parks-in-indianapolis-marion-county-pumps-17-5-million-american-rescue-plan-federal-funds-indiana/8438465002/
• https://www.indystar.com/story/news/local/2024/01/16/stanley-strader-park-renamed-honor-indianapolis-southeast-side-leader/72235085007/
• Andrew Bowman Interview, Southside USCTC Oral History Collection, Recorded 2023, Unpublished.