City dismantled Black community for urban renewal. Decades later, it still hasn't happened

Indianapolis Star

3 days ago

ELKHART, Ind. — The red brick pavers covered by overgrown weeds near South 6th Street and Dr. MLK Jr. Drive are some of the last remnants of a community that once thrived in this part of Elkhart.
This area, called Benham West, was the civic, cultural and commercial hub for Black residents who settled south of the train tracks, the dividing line that separated them from the rest of the city even decades after desegregation. Residents called this area the "Village" because, literally and figuratively, this was their community at a time when many of the Northern Indiana city's predominantly White residents were hostile to the color of their skin.
But the tight-knit community is long gone.
The city incrementally and systematically bulldozed the neighborhood over more than two decades of aggressive urban renewal. The work uprooted families. Lifelong business owners lost their livelihoods. Homeowners were forced to move to other parts of the city where they were not welcome. Older residents found themselves starting anew, burdened with heftier mortgages they had little time left to pay off, said Steve Millsaps, who grew up in the neighborhood and whose relatives owned homes and businesses there.
Officials spent millions of dollars in city and federal funds to buy and raze properties. When residents lost their homes and businesses, they also lost a level of self-sufficiency and assets they could've passed on to their descendants, said Nekeisha Alayna, an Elkhart resident who helped create a documentary about the neighborhood's history. After people dispersed, the neighborhood's community leaders also left, creating a "big vacuum," she said.
After all of that, the promised urban revitalization never happened. Politics, the economy and, some argued, bigotry got in the way.
"They just screwed us out of our land," Millsaps said.
The historical dismantling of neighborhoods is not exclusive to Elkhart or any one city. Urban renewal projects cleared low and middle-income housing in cities nationwide, including Indianapolis, beginning in the 1950s, often targeting neighborhoods where Black residents built their own communities because discriminatory practices of the era kept them from buying or building homes elsewhere.
In Elkhart, a manufacturing hub 160 miles north, Benham West became one of the city's most underdeveloped and impoverished neighborhoods after years of disinvestment. Some see the dismantling of Benham West as part of the city's ugly history with racism. The neighborhood and its surrounding areas were also plagued with troubling policing practices by a group of rogue officers known as the Wolverines, who systematically targeted Black citizens for harassment and false arrests.
"Benham West and what occurred in Benham West was a failure on multiple levels," said Rod Roberson, who grew up near the neighborhood and was elected the city's first Black mayor in 2019. "But it also failed an entire city and community as well."
Roberson said the city now has a long-term plan to revitalize Benham West and surrounding areas, launched a few years ago with the opening of a large community center just outside the neighborhood. But the 55-acre swatch of Benham West still remains a patchwork of empty and overgrown lots, dotted with vacant buildings, a smattering of businesses, a thrift store that also provides beds for the unhoused, a church and some housing.
On 6th Street and Dr. MLK Jr. Drive — the old neighborhood's main thoroughfare where homes and businesses once stood — is an auto body shop. Across the street is a big empty lot that was recently remediated to get rid of contaminants.
In its heyday, Benham West was a community of single-family homes with well-maintained yards on walkable streets where children played. Businesses, including restaurants, bars, barbershops and barbecue joints, were beloved because they were owned by families and friends. A neighborhood church and a community center — originally called the Colored Community Center and later renamed after Booker T. Washington — helped families raise children. On holidays, residents traded cakes and pies.
That's how Jackie Small, who grew up in Benham West, remembers the neighborhood.
"I tell my grandchildren," she said, "'I wish you could've lived in the era that I lived in.'"
But the community also seemed excluded from the rest of the city.
Roberson, whose family was among those that migrated from the South in the 1950s, recalled riding his bicycle out of Benham West and to a sporting goods store downtown when he was 10 years old. Once he passed the underpass beneath the train tracks, he knew he was not welcome.
"There were a couple of teenagers who were a little bit older than I was and let me know that I wasn't in the right place," Roberson said. "And so you realize that you're outside of your community."
By the 1960s, Benham West had become a priority for urban renewal. City officials sought federal financing and allotted local dollars to buy and demolish properties they believed were substandard. Residents initially resisted because they did not want to lose the bonds of their community and their only church.
As the Black population was pushed out of Benham West, "one can easily observe 'for sale' signs on the lawns of white homeowners," according to a 1965 article that cited a report by the Elkhart Urban League.
Jamie Pitts, a professor at the Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary who studied the neighborhood's history, said fears that the redevelopment would entail moving Black residents into White neighborhoods prompted city officials to essentially push Benham West residents into another concentrated area even further south of the train tracks.
Some did move north of the tracks — and some of them were met with trepidation and threats.
Plez and Brenda Lovelady left Benham West in the 1970s and moved to a house a few miles north, where residents were predominantly White. One day, they found a cross burning in their yard.
Many of the houses in Benham West had been razed by then. In their place was a public housing complex the city built a few years earlier for low-income residents. Crime, a problem that older residents said was not a huge problem before all the houses were torn down, plagued the "virtually deserted" area, according to a 1974 newspaper article.
By the 1980s, the Washington Gardens public housing complex was one of the most heavily policed parts of the city. The Wolverines, former officers said, used it as their playground.
A few businessowners stood firm against the city's urban renewal plans. They had sunk their life savings into their businesses and wanted to be paid a fair price.
"You're talking about taking away a livelihood and a community," said Charles Walker, who grew up in Benham West. "And you can't repay that."
One of those businessowners was Millsaps' uncle, Marion "Monk" Scott, who operated Monk's Bar on Benham West's main thoroughfare for decades. It was one of the last businesses the city bought because Scott refused to give it up. He rebuilt his business a few blocks south, Millsaps said.
Another businessowner was Small's father, Henry Otterbridge, who owned Henry's Pool Hall where, as she put it, "everybody gathered, good or bad." In the late 1980s, when much of the old neighborhood had been demolished, the city sued Otterbridge to force him to sell his property.
Otterbridge ultimately sold his business to the city, but he was required to split the money with the previous owner of of the property, which used to be a car service station before it became a pool hall, Small explained. Then, city officials later told her father he had to pay to remove gas tanks that had sat underground for years, she said. After everything, Otterbridge was left with only $35,000 to start anew.
"That broke my dad," Small said.
Otterbridge opened another business further south, Henry's Grocery Store, but business was slow and people kept owing him money, Small said. In the early 1990s, somebody ransacked the store and set it on fire.
"After that," she said, "my dad just said, 'I tried to do what I could do, but I can't do it no more.'"
The city did intend to redevelop Benham West. In fact, there were many proposals.
A green space. A park. A playground. A mix of residential, industrial and commercial developments. Consultants were hired. Studies were conducted. Sketches were drawn. Thousands of dollars were spent. Promises were made. But Benham West residents felt left out of the decision-making process.
In the 1980s, then-Elkhart Mayor Eleanor Kesim proposed a 23-acre park, citing the urgency to fulfill the decades-long promise. But some City Council members preferred selling chunks of Benham West to industrial developers and were concerned that building a park would indefinitely lock the city into paying for maintenance costs. A years-long impasse over whether a predominantly Black neighborhood deserved a park consumed much of Kesim's time as mayor.
"My belief in our responsibility to develop Benham West after the drastic urban renewal of the 1970s dismantled whole neighborhoods has not diminished nor has my concern about the not so veiled bigotry of some citizens of this community," Kesim said in 1982, when she proposed a cheaper park the City Council rejected. "Such bigotry is childish, pathetic and indicative of minds crippled by hatred."
That same year, the City Council approved a spending plan that did not include the park. Benham West residents showed up in protest. One was quoted in the paper saying, "You are against our black skins."
More ideas, like building a mini-college campus, were thrown around. Kesim's successor, Mayor James Perron, reached out to a few schools, but no one committed. It also became apparent that few industrial or commercial developers wanted to build in the neighborhood.
The lack of progress became a joke.
The first sentence of a 1987 newspaper story read: "Being an Elkhart city official hoping for the redevelopment of the Benham West property is like being a Chicago Cubs fun. You're always waiting for next year."
Perron did make some progress, but almost none of those redevelopments lasted.
A museum that opened with much fanfare later moved to a different location. A Veterans of Foreign Wars post also opened, but it later shut down and became an Ivy Tech facility. That too later closed, and the building is now empty. Right next to it is a vacant site with a "For Sale" sign.
"You get politicians paying lip-service to the idea of redevelopment every 5 to 10 years without much follow through," said Pitts, the Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary professor. "Around 2000, a city redevelopment official was quoted in the paper saying, more or less, 'I guess it wasn't enough to just tear things down, there should have been a plan.'"
The city's poor track record has led to deep skepticism for some that Elkhart will ever fulfill its promise of revitalizing the area.
"One of the bigger problems we have in this city is we have meetings, and at the end of the meetings, you know what we have?" asked former Benham West resident Plez Lovelady. "Nothing but a bunch of dirty coffee cups."
When he was elected mayor six years ago, Roberson found there were comprehensive development plans for several areas of Elkhart. But there still was none for Benham West.
"The lack of being able to provide a comprehensive plan in order to grow that area and to do the right things in that area is political failure," he said. "It's also the failure of a community to be engaged in the process as well. It's important that I'm held accountable to do what I should be doing in those areas. But it's also important for us to be able to give the community something that it can rally around."
The city now has a long-term redevelopment plan in which stakeholders have a say in what they want their neighborhood to become, Roberson said. It involves creating community assets, both in Benham West and in the surrounding neighborhood south of the tracks, that would help raise property values and draw developers to the area.
One of those assets is a new 30,000-square-foot center named after two Black community leaders. The Tolson Center for Community Excellence is equipped with two gyms, a dance and exercise room, a computer and arcade room, an art center, a cafeteria with an industrial kitchen and other venues that host various programs for children. There's ongoing construction outside for a soccer field, playground, and basketball and pickleball courts.
About a mile south is another recently opened center that helps adults earn a high school diploma and provides job training. Next door is the neighborhood's new and only health center. The two facilities are located in a large shopping mall the city hopes to turn into a commercial and residential area.
Rebuilding the area will be a long, "tedious process," Roberson said.
"But it's one with a plan," he said. "And it's one that we're going to continue to stay with as long as I'm here."