Day One:
9 a.m. Preservationists and historians are meeting with me today to work on developing a Black heritage sites signage program. It will help identify cultural, civic, social, religious and other sites throughout the state.
I feel that we’re losing memory of the significance of many of these places, so there is urgency to get this program up and running.
So often Black heritage sites have difficulty receiving historic designation because of a lack of written history, loss of integrity to the site and demolition/erasure of the site.
We’re excited about the potential.
Day Two:
1 p.m. At the closing show for Deborah Asante’s play, “A Touch of Glory.” Just about all of my family members are graduates of Crispus Attucks High School, except me and my younger brother. I learned the Attucks song, know the cheers, and went to the games and plays. I am an honorary Tiger.
[Learn how the Crispus Attucks High School theater program was revived.]
Deborah’s play is the amazing story of the 1955 Crispus Attucks High School basketball team’s state championship win. I’ve now seen it twice.
Asante and her team receive a standing ovation.
Day Three:
10 a.m. Spending lots of time in Gary, Ind., with the Indiana Landmarks Black Heritage Preservation Program. We are working to find an adaptive reuse of Gary Roosevelt High School. Will it be a museum? A mixed-use site? Housing? We’re considering the options.
12:30 p.m. In the Midtown neighborhood, where the Jackson 5 family house is located at 2300 Jackson Place. The house is not on the National Register for Historic Places nor is it an Indiana Historical Bureau historic site.
The application for its historic designation was turned down a few years ago, but the Indiana Landmarks Black Heritage Preservation Program is working to change that and honor the family that has had an international impact on culture.
[Listen and read about how Wes Montgomery received his historical marker.]
Day Four:
2 p.m. My Juneteenth Black heritage concert team meets to plan the gospel and blues concert, “The Roots of it All,” June 16 at Indiana Landmarks. Helping with this event: Kyle Long, Thomas J. Griffin, Ethel McCane, Lester Johnson, Ezra Bufford and a long list of entertainers, including Tad Robinson.
Our plan is to tell the history of this music and its impact on all genres and celebrate Juneteenth, which used to be observed in Indiana in September and later in January as Emancipation Day.
The lineup is all local. Indiana has gospel and blues talent that can compete with talent anywhere in the country. We are also throwing in a Juneteenth performance by Resilience Productions, a theater company founded by three talented women from Bloomington.
Day Five:
3 p.m. Celebrating Black History Month at Oasis of Hope Baptist Church, on East 25th Street. We learn some history about the church. What a great event!
4 p.m. I take a small group to the old Beth El Temple on Fairfield Avenue to see its potential for becoming an African American history museum. Parking is inadequate and lots of work would be required, but we are not giving up on finding another location.
Day Six:
6 p.m. With dozens of others watching the documentary “Reviving the West Baden Colored Church: A Labor of Love,” at Indiana Landmarks. The documentary details the founding, growth and decline of the church and efforts to restore it.
Members of the church lived in West Baden Springs and French Lick, and had come to that area to work at hotels as porters, bellhops, servers and housekeepers. The church became the cornerstone of the African American community.
Through the support of Indiana Landmarks and other organizations, the church has been restored to its original condition. Most of the people who did the restoration work were seniors in their 60s, 70s and 80s.
Day Seven:
9 a.m. I’m on a cruise ship that’s about to dock at Bimini, a predominantly Black Island located in the westernmost district of the Bahamas, east of Miami.
The weather is perfect — a balmy 80 degrees. There’s a soft breeze. About 2,200 people live in Bimini, the island where Dr. Martin Luther King wrote his famous Nobel Peace Prize speech. Ernest Hemingway had his hideout here where the pristine beaches teem with marlin and conch.
And Jimmy Buffet spent time here writing one of his books. This was also the getaway spot for Howard Hughes, Richard Nixon, Adam Clayton Powell and now me.
11 a.m. I and other Hoosiers go on an island tour. We sample rum punch and learn about the many uses of conch and its shell. We tour the Dolphin House, a beautiful art deco museum made of conch, other fish shells and recycled materials.
We stop in an area known as downtown, where there is a market, neglected government buildings and the Bimini Museum, which is a pink, two-story, federal style site built in the 1800s. In the yard is a rusted canon left by the English.
1:30 p.m. A taxi driver tells me that before COVID, the Bimini Museum was a thriving tourist stop. When the pandemic hit, the museum staff took time off, but left the museum accessible to tourists. Tourists stole the artifacts. The museum is now closed.
Eunice Trotter is from a pioneer Hoosier Black family with roots in Indiana dating back to the 1790s. She has won numerous reporting and writing awards, and in 2017 was inducted into the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame. Eunice is now the first director of Indiana Landmark’s Black Heritage Preservation Program.