A.B. Whitlock

“Arthur Brown Whitlock became Gary’s first Black city council member who pioneered civil rights inside the city.”Korry Shepard

I was delighted to find Gary Historical Collective director Korry Shepard’s column on A.B. Whitlock in the NWI Times. Whitlock played a critical role in protesting segregationist policies that the school board adopted. Shepard notes that Whitlock was born in 1886 in Charleston, South Carolina, the son of Lucila Dickerson and white Methodist minister, harness maker, and Civil War veteran William Henry Whitlock. A.B. Whitlock and wife Almyra moved to Alabama, to attend Tuskegee Institute and then to Mississippi for further schooling at Rust University before joining his father in Gary in 1917, part of the Great Migration of southern Blacks to northern industrial cities. Whitlock found work as a motor inspector and before long took an interest in politics as a means of furthering Black advancement. Joining the Republican party, Whitlock was elected to the city council in November 1921, after his Democratic opponent withdrew due to a scandal. During the 1920s he opened a grocery at 2200 Broadway, six years later founded the Gary American, and also invested money in beachfront property near Pine Station. At a time when Blacks were forbidden to use Miller beaches, Pine Beach, which had bathhouses, fishing facilities, and concession stands, was the only place where African Americans had access to lake Michigan.

  In the Fall of 1927 approximately half the white students at Emerson boycotted classes after 18 Black students seeking college preparatory classes were transferred there from Virginia Street School. Over the objection of School Superintendent William A. Wirt, who, according to Korry Shepard, believed the Ku Klux Klan was behind the strike, the school board on Mayor Floyd Williams’ recommendation voted to oust the transfer students. At Wirt’s urging, the board agreed to construct a K-12 facility equal in quality to Emerson that eventually became Gary Roosevelt. During a city council meeting Whitlock denounced the surrender to “mob rule,” claimed that “poor white trash” had fomented the trouble, and argued that the segregationist policy was a signal from the city’s white power structure that members of his race were unwelcome. As I wrote in “Gary’s First Hundred Years”: “African Americans were forced to make the best of a bad situation. They took pride in Roosevelt School, but as NAACP leader Joseph Pitts noted, it took 40 years to complete all the promised facilities. Some Blacks continued to attend Froebel, but they were put in separate classrooms, could not join the band or most clubs, and could only use the swimming pool on the day before it was cleaned. They could participate in sports but not shower with white athletes. These practices, some felt, were designed to encourage Blacks to transfer voluntarily to Roosevelt.”

Shepard mentioned that in 1929 Whitlock lost his council seat to William J. Hardaway after political opponents spread rumors that he was involved in bootlegging during an era of Prohibition. He lived a productive life, editing the Gary American for 20 years, speaking out against police brutality and segregation, before turning the reins over to his son and daughter-in-law. He died in in 1967, ten months before another civil rights pioneer, Richard Gordon Hatcher, was elected mayor.