1974, ISBN: 9780871951618

First settled by African Americans in 1878, Indianapolis's east-side district of Martindale had, by the early 1940s, fallen onto hard times. A bleak economic outlook had helped fuel a gro… Plus…

First settled by African Americans in 1878, Indianapolis's east-side district of Martindale had, by the early 1940s, fallen onto hard times. A bleak economic outlook had helped fuel a growing crime rate among the neighborhood's young people. Into this seemingly hopeless situation stepped a forty-four-year-old wife and mother who knew something about despair, having endured the death of a beloved daughter. In 1941 the woman -- Edna Mae Barnes Martin -- established in Martindale a day care center for the children of working mothers. At first in an apartment building and later in a "three-room shotgun house," Martin offered hope and security to countless young African Americans. Made possible by a Clio Grant from the Indiana Historical Society, this is the first-ever biography of Martin, founder and director of the East Side Christian Center. As author Wilma Rugh Taylor notes, for thirty years the black Christian activist "reformed so-called unredeemable boys, trained girls to be competent women, clothed and fed multitudes, and found jobs for the unemployed." Calling Martin an activist in the same mode as a Mother Teresa, Taylor writes that in the midst of one of Indianapolis's worst ghettos, Martin reached out to embrace children "that no one else wanted to touch." Through her work, Martin, who died in 1974, also helped to break down some of the negative racial attitudes held by the community's white residents by utilizing the "plain, unpoliticized Gospel of Jesus Christ." Through the years, Martin's East Side Christian Center received the financial backing of such philanthropists as Edith Stokely Moore, the daughter of the founder of the Stokely Brothers Company, and John S. Lynn, the director of the Eli Lilly Foundation. Martin's work on behalf of the disadvantaged also received the financial and spiritual backing of many white women missionaries in such Hoosier communities as Boggstown, Dana, Franklin, Milan, Petersburg, Sardinia, Scottsburg, Waldron, and Washington. Sister of the Solid Rock: Edna Mae Barnes Martin and the East Side Christian Center features an introduction by William H. Wiggins, Jr., Indiana University professor of Afro-American studies. It examines not only Martin's work with the East Side Christian Center but also her life from her youth on a farm in Mount Vernon, Indiana, to her education at segregated Indianapolis schools and her religious activity at Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church, where she met her husband, Earl Martin. "The house that Edna Martin would build upon her rock and resolve," writes Taylor, "would grow from a tiny room jammed with tattered children to a Christian center named in her honor." Book jacket. Media ><