At a time when teaching a black person to read was a crime in some parts of the United States, and African American access to public education was virtually non-existent in Indiana, North Western Christian University (Butler University) was founded on the principle that admission was open to all on an equal basis. The first woman received her degree in 1856, a year after the university opened, but not until 1887 was the first African American was so honored.
When Gertrude Amelia Mahorney received her bachelor’s degree from Butler, she became the first African American woman to receive a degree from an Indiana college or university. She taught German in the Indianapolis public “colored schools” before later being named teacher in charge of the Ohio Street Colored School in Rockville, Indiana where she remained until the end of the 1913-14 school year. Her brother John Joseph Mahorney was the “first colored boy” to graduate from Butler University, receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1889. He struggled to find employment as a civil engineer “owing to prejudice against his color” before his death on July 14, 1892 at his Irvington home after a brief illness.
Few African Americans attended Butler prior to the First World War. Among those were Prof. Ezra C. Roberts (1898), teacher in the Indianapolis public schools and principal of the academic department at Tuskegee Institute; Rev. Henry L. Herod (1903), Indianapolis civic and welfare leader and pastor of Second Christian Church; Prof. Sylvester Howard Duvalle (1912), teacher in the Indianapolis public schools and professor of chemistry at Lincoln Institute, Jefferson City, Missouri; and Rev. Daniel A. Hastings (1913), a Jamaican who was a missionary to Angola.
Not all African American students completed their course of study at Butler. One was Noble Lee Sissle who showed greater talent off the basketball court as an accomplished tenor. While at Butler, he composed “Butler Will Shine Tonight” which led his fellow classmate Howard Caldwell, Sr to later claim, “Butler had no spirited school song to urge our athletes on to victory” before this song. Sissle left Butler in 1915 to begin a decades-long entertainment partnership with musician and songwriter Eubie Blake. In 1921 the pair wrote the first African American Broadway musical revue “Shuffle Along” featuring such hits as “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” “In Honeysuckle Time,” “Love Will Find A Way,” and “You Were Meant for Me.”
While Butler College had an open admissions policy since its founding, the Greek social side of campus life was restricted to “whites only.” As African American enrollment continued to increase modestly, black students developed an interest in having their own Greek chapter. This desire led Henrietta Herod, Murray Atkins, Joyce Stewart, Goldie Thompson, Mercy Woolfork, and Ada Haskins Wheeler to apply for a chapter of the national black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha. In 1920, the Kappa Chapter, Alpha Kappa Alpha was organized on the Butler campus with Murray Atkins as its first president. Also in 1920, Nu Chapter, Kappa Alpha Psi, a black college men’s fraternity, was chartered in Indianapolis with membership limited to African American students attending Butler College, Indiana Dental School, and Indiana Law School. Butler had no immediate active members, but Harry Campbell and Theodore David were pledges in 1923.
In May 1922, Iota Lambda Chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha, the oldest African American inter-collegiate fraternity, was organized in Indianapolis and authorized to initiate students from various colleges in Indiana. The following year its roster included Butler students Averitte Henry Corley of Irvington, Robert Todd Duncan (who played the first Porgy in Porgy & Bess on Broadway), Solomon Edwards, and James Ervin. Later in 1922, Mary Lou Allison, a graduate of Indianapolis Normal School and a third-grade teacher at Indianapolis Public School No. 24 (colored), joined with Butler grads Nannie Mae Gahn, Vivian Irene White, and four others in the founding Alpha Chapter of Sigma Gamma Rho sorority on Butler’s Irvington campus.
Indianapolis had been a de facto segregated city for some years, so when a resurgent Ku Klux Klan came to the city in 1921 it found a receptive audience. Despite being denounced by many public officials and organizations, its patriotic Americanism message and opposition to foreign influences was still favorably received by many white Hoosiers. In the late spring of 1923, Tolerance, a Chicago anti-Klan paper, published the names of 12,208 men in Marion County, Indiana who were alleged Klan members. The list included Butler College professor Pleasant Hightower and several members of the Lambda Chi fraternity. David Curtis “D. C.” Stephenson, grand dragon of the Klan, lived within a couple of blocks of Butler’s main campus, and Irvingtonian Ed Jackson, who with Klan support, would be elected governor of Indiana in 1924.
The Klan of the twenties directed its hatred at foreign born immigrants, Catholics, and Jews. African Americans were of a lesser interest to the Klan, possibly because “they knew their place” in a segregated Indianapolis. In Irvington the only overt act by the Klan was a cross burning on New Year’s Eve ushering in the year of 1923. The blazing cross in a vacant lot at Butler Ave. and East Washington St. attracted a crowd of several hundred before it was extinguished by the fire department. Coincidently, the cross burning was about a half block from the Klan infested Lambda Chi fraternity house.
Despite the Klan influences swirling around Butler College, the institution continued to be open to African Americans. Butler provided the Indianapolis public schools with space in the basement of the Bona Thompson Memorial Library for several “black educational projects unwelcome in other Irvington facilities.” However, at the height of Klan power, for no apparent reason, the 1924 Butler Drift departed from previous years and listed the black students at the end of their class section in the yearbook. The following year, Butler President Robert Aley was able to announce a “gratifying” 22 African American men and 29 African American women were attending the college.
By the time Butler College changed its designation to Butler University and announced plans to relocate its campus from Irvington to Fairview Park, Fall Creek had become “the color line” with neighborhoods north of the stream forming associations with the intent of “stopping or preventing Negroes from living” in the area. There is little doubt that the Butler board of directors in 1927 had the concerns of their soon-to-be Fairview white neighbors in mind when it imposed an admissions quota limiting the annual number of African Americans to ten. Once Butler had relocated to Fairview campus, despite its quota on admissions, the University Community Service Club was formed by white property owners for the “purpose of protecting the community around Butler against the encroachment of colored people; to protect white property investments and to save Butler University by all lawful methods.” The admissions quota remained in effect until 1948.
