Malone

A thin record, and why the thinness matters

Lincoln, Nebraska is not a city most American readers associate with Black history. The census counted roughly one hundred fifty Black residents in 1880 and fewer than a thousand through the 1910s. The neighborhood that this essay describes, a fifty-block rectangle east of the University of Nebraska’s city campus, has never held more than a few thousand African-American residents at any one time. The documentary record on Black Lincoln is thin by comparison with Omaha next door, thinner still by comparison with Chicago or Kansas City.¹

The thinness is part of the subject. A small community that gets smaller in the archive because no one writes it down is a community whose destruction is easier to miss. Lincoln’s Black residents understood the risk. From the 1910s on, they built the institutions that would keep the record: Quinn Chapel A.M.E. Church, the Lincoln Urban League, the Lincoln branch of the NAACP, and a weekly newspaper called The Voice. The Malone Community Center, which the Urban League opened as its headquarters in 1942 and which the board renamed in 1955 for the director who ran it through the 1940s, has served as the single most durable institution. The Center and the University of Nebraska Libraries are now digitizing the Center’s archives under a three-year grant. The collaboration will release roughly six thousand documents between 2024 and 2027, the largest recovery of Black Lincoln’s written record ever undertaken.²³

The Atlas does not inflate the record beyond what the sources carry. Where a figure comes from a single secondary source, the essay says so. Where the number of families the city removed for a particular project is unknown, the essay says that, too. The federal documents, the city council minutes, the planning reports, and the community’s own papers are the only record on which the Atlas can stand. The Malone Community Center Digitization Project will enlarge that record in the coming three years. A future revision of this essay will carry what the new releases show.

Image pendingThe U Street commercial strip in Lincoln's Malone neighborhood in the 1940s, with the Urban League Community Center visible mid-block.Sought from Malone Community Center / University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries, 1945

T-Town, 1867 to 1942

Lincoln became Nebraska’s capital in 1867. Black migrants reached the city in the decade that followed, most of them from Missouri, Kansas, and the former Confederate states. The first families clustered in the blocks north and east of the new Capitol grounds, along T Street and U Street between roughly 17th and 27th. They called the neighborhood T-Town after its central thoroughfare. The name stuck.⁴

The community grew modestly through the late nineteenth century. Quinn Chapel A.M.E. Church organized in 1873 and gave the neighborhood its first institutional anchor. Newman Methodist spun off from Quinn in the 1890s. A handful of Black-owned businesses opened along the commercial strip: Vine Street Dairy, Wade’s Barber Shop, and a cluster of cafes and boarding houses that served railroad porters working the Burlington and Union Pacific lines through the capital.⁴

The First World War and the Great Migration brought the second wave. Black families moved into Lincoln from Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, and the Mississippi Delta through the 1910s and 1920s. The population roughly doubled between 1910 and 1930. The new arrivals found the rental and sale market in Lincoln already closing around them. In 1916, the developers of Sheridan Boulevard wrote the first racial covenant into their deeds, restricting ownership to members of “the Caucasian race” and permitting Black occupancy only in the role of servant. In 1924, Piedmont adopted a similar covenant. The Brownbilt subdivision south of Randolph School banned sale to “Africans, Chinese, or Japanese” through the 1930s, 1940s, and into the 1950s.⁴ Most of the newer neighborhoods on Lincoln’s west and south sides adopted some version of the clause. The effect was cumulative. By the late 1920s, Black residents who wanted to buy or rent a home in Lincoln had almost nowhere to go outside the T-Town rectangle.

The Lincoln branch of the NAACP organized in 1918. Oliver Burkhardt served as the first president. Trago T. McWilliams, a minister who ran three diners in town and edited a community newspaper called The Weekly Review, sat on the founding committee along with William Woods.⁵ The branch fought for open housing, for the seating of Black customers at downtown lunch counters, and for the admission of Black children to the Lincoln Public Schools on equal terms. The branch lost its charter in 1939 after several years of decline and reorganized later. Its early records, held by History Nebraska, remain one of the most detailed windows into what daily civil-rights work in a small capital city looked like between the wars.⁶

The Federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation reached Lincoln in the mid-1930s. The HOLC’s residential-security maps graded every American city of any size on a four-tier scale, from “best” in green through “hazardous” in red. The HOLC maps encoded the racial makeup of each neighborhood as a pricing signal for mortgage risk. The grade ran directly downstream from the census tract’s Black, immigrant, and Jewish population shares. Lincoln’s map colored the T-Town blocks red. Banks and federally insured lenders used the grades through the 1930s and 1940s to deny mortgages, deny refinance applications, and deny construction loans in the hazardous zones.⁷⁸ The covenant system and the HOLC grade worked together. One kept Black Lincoln out of most of the city. The other starved the blocks where the community lived of the capital that would have let owners maintain or improve their homes.

Melvin L. Shakespeare, the associate pastor of Quinn Chapel, and his wife Rubie W. Shakespeare began publishing The Voice on October 11, 1946. The paper ran weekly until May 14, 1953. It dedicated itself to “the promotion of the culture, social and spiritual life of a great people” and reported on community activities in Lincoln, Hastings, and other Nebraska towns.⁹ Trago McWilliams wrote a column in its pages. The Library of Congress holds the complete run in its Chronicling America digital collection. The paper is the single densest primary source on Black Lincoln in the postwar decade, the years during which the Malone Community Center took shape on U Street.

The Malone Community Center, 1932 to the present

Trago McWilliams organized a local chapter of the National Urban League in Lincoln in 1932. The chapter operated out of rented rooms for its first decade. In the late 1930s, Nathan Gold, the Jewish owner of the Gold’s department store downtown, lent the Urban League the money to rent a temporary home and joined the Community Chest in raising matching funds for a federal grant toward a permanent building.¹⁰ The fundraising closed in 1941. Construction finished in 1942. The building at 2030 T Street, which the city later renumbered 2032 U Street, opened that spring with a gymnasium, an auditorium, a kitchen, a library, and meeting rooms.

Clyde Malone was born in Lincoln in 1890. He served as the second director of the Lincoln Urban League from 1942 until his death in 1951, succeeding the founding director Millard Woods. Malone sat on the founding committee of the Lincoln NAACP branch and served as the branch’s first president. He ran the Urban League Community Center through the war years and the early postwar period. When the Lincoln chapter disaffiliated from the National Urban League in 1954, the board renamed the building and the organization the Malone Center in his honor.¹⁰⁵ The formal incorporation of the Clyde Malone Community Center followed in 1955.

The Center stood at the heart of Black Lincoln through every subsequent decade. The building hosted athletic leagues, the Lincoln chapter of the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, summer programs, literacy classes, a railroad men’s social club, and the neighborhood’s voter-registration drives.⁴ It served as the place where families who had no mortgage could still hold a reception, where children who attended segregated or semi-segregated schools could find a swimming pool and a basketball court, and where organizers could meet without seeking entry to a white-owned venue whose proprietors might refuse them.

The Center outlasted the buildings around it. When the Urban League’s original 1942 building reached the end of its useful life, the Center’s board raised funds for a replacement on the same block. The new Clyde Malone Community Center opened in 1981 at 2032 U Street. The Sinclair Hille-designed expansion at the same address opened in the 2020s. The address has stayed constant across more than eighty years of construction and reconstruction. The Center is the only institution in Lincoln that has served Black residents continuously from the 1930s forward.¹¹

The Malone neighborhood lies north and east of downtown Lincoln. The Malone Community Center, opened in 1942, has anchored Black Lincoln through the Northeast Radial land seizures of 1968 to 1974, which the city later abandoned, and through the Antelope Valley Project of roughly 2005 to 2012, which displaced forty-four homes and nineteen businesses. The map carries the 1930s redline overlay, the Northeast Radial's intended path, and the Antelope Valley footprint.

The map shows Malone neighborhood, T-Town, Malone Community Center, 2032 U Street, Quinn Chapel A.M.E. Church, 1873 to present, Cushman factory, absorbed into UNL Innovation Campus, Northeast Radial right-of-way, 1968 to 1981 (canceled), and Antelope Valley Parkway, 2005 to 2012.

• Malone neighborhood, T-Town
• Malone Community Center, 2032 U Street
• Quinn Chapel A.M.E. Church, 1873 to present
• Cushman factory, absorbed into UNL Innovation Campus
• Northeast Radial right-of-way, 1968 to 1981 (canceled)
• Antelope Valley Parkway, 2005 to 2012

Urban Renewal Atlas, illustrative boundary.; Malone Community Center at 2032 U Street, 1942 to present.; Quinn Chapel A.M.E. Church, the neighborhood's first institutional anchor.; Seventeen-and-eight-tenths-acre Cushman factory site, 1913 to 2014; Innovation Campus 2014 onward.; Canceled Northeast Radial freeway alignment through the heart of the Malone neighborhood.; Antelope Valley Parkway alignment along the western edge of the Malone neighborhood..

The Northeast Radial, 1963 to 1981

Lincoln’s postwar planners wanted a freeway from downtown to the northeast corner of the city. The state’s engineers laid out a diagonal route through T-Town. The road would have run from the Capitol grounds northeast across Vine Street, through the blocks east of campus, and out toward the Lincoln Airport and the Interstate 80 interchange at 27th Street. The route crossed the heart of the Malone neighborhood. The road would have passed between the University’s Beadle Center and the Malone Community Center itself, forming a new eastern edge for the University and a new western edge for what remained of the Black residential blocks.¹²¹³

The city began buying properties along the route in 1968. Acquisition continued through 1974. The City of Lincoln’s own planning records, cited in the InterLinc documentation for the later Antelope Valley project, state that the city acquired approximately two hundred eighty-seven properties for the Northeast Radial during those six years. Other retrospective summaries of the program put the total closer to three hundred. The homes and small businesses the city took stood disproportionately on the blocks where the Black community lived or where it shopped.¹²

The city did not build the road. Federal highway funds tightened after 1973. The 1973 oil shock and the 1974 recession reduced state and federal transportation budgets simultaneously. Public opposition to urban freeway construction, which had defeated similar projects in Boston, San Francisco, and New Orleans in the same period, reached Lincoln as well. In 1980, the Lincoln City Council voted 5 to 2 to kill the Northeast Radial. In 1981, Lincoln voters ratified the council’s decision at the ballot box.¹²

The cancellation did not restore the neighborhood. The city had spent twelve years acquiring and clearing the right-of-way. Many of the seized homes sat empty through the 1970s and fell into disrepair. Some the city demolished outright, producing vacant lots that the surrounding blocks still ringed a decade later. Others the city let rot until demolition became the only remaining option. The Radial Reuse Project, which the city and a coalition of neighborhood associations launched in the early 1980s, tried to resell the most viable parcels to homebuilders and to convert the rest into pocket parks, bike trails, and open space.¹² The reuse effort filled some of the gaps. It did not reassemble the street grid the city had cut. The vacant parcels the city had bought from Black families in 1970 became pocket parks whose benches those families’ children would not regularly occupy, because their families had already moved somewhere else.

The University of Nebraska pressed east through the same period. David A. Montgomery, Frank A. Pratt, and three co-authors wrote the 1972 geography-department study “The Face of Malone” for the department’s Occasional Papers series; the study covered the fifty-five blocks from Q to Y Streets and from 19th to 26th. The study identified the Cushman motor-works factory at 21st and X, in operation since 1913, as the “sharpest and clearest element of the landscape” and the single factor that would determine whether the neighborhood stayed residential or fell to institutional expansion. The authors wrote the study inside the Burgess transition-zone framework, which treated neighborhoods adjacent to central business districts and universities as inherently unstable, cycling from residential to commercial or institutional over a generation or two. The frame flattened what was happening in Malone into a natural process. The displacement was not natural. The covenant system, the HOLC map, the Radial takings, and the University’s land acquisitions had produced the “transition zone” deliberately.¹⁴

Textron, which bought Cushman in 1957, ran the factory through the end of the century. In 2003, Textron sold the seventeen-and-eight-tenths-acre site to the University of Nebraska for four million nine hundred thousand dollars. The University let the buildings stand through the 2000s and tore them down in 2014. The land became part of the University’s Innovation Campus.¹⁵ The 1972 study’s central prediction proved correct. The factory had held the neighborhood’s eastern edge against the University. Once the factory closed, the University absorbed the land.

Image pendingCleared lots along the planned Northeast Radial right-of-way in the Malone neighborhood of Lincoln, Nebraska, after six years of city property acquisitions.Sought from Lincoln Journal Star Archive, 1973

The Antelope Valley Project, 1994 to 2012

Antelope Creek runs north and east out of the hills south of downtown Lincoln, curves around the east side of the Capitol, and drains into Salt Creek on the north edge of the city. The creek had flooded downtown Lincoln and the blocks east of campus repeatedly through the twentieth century. The 1974 flood caused several million dollars in damage and triggered a long federal-state-local planning process over how to widen the channel and keep the water out of the basements along U Street.

The planning process formalized in the mid-1990s as the Antelope Valley Project, a joint effort of the City of Lincoln, the University of Nebraska, and the Lower Platte South Natural Resources District. The project combined three programs: a widened flood-control channel for Antelope Creek, a new north-south arterial called the Antelope Valley Parkway, and a downtown redevelopment zone along the new right-of-way. The budget grew from roughly one hundred million dollars in early estimates to approximately two hundred forty-six million dollars by completion, the largest public-works program in Lincoln’s history.¹⁶¹⁷

Construction ran from 2005 to 2012. The project bought and demolished forty-four homes and nineteen businesses within its direct footprint. Broader figures for the adjacent redevelopment zone ran substantially higher. The combined parkway and flood-channel corridor cut through the eastern edge of the Malone neighborhood and along the historic Hartley and Clinton neighborhoods to the north. The affected blocks held a mix of Black, white, and, in the north sections, newer Mexican-American and Vietnamese-American households.¹⁶¹⁸

The city staffed the Antelope Valley Project with a more visible community-engagement process than it had used on the Northeast Radial. Planners held public meetings through the late 1990s and early 2000s. The House Preservation and Infill Program, which the city’s planning department archive documents, funded the relocation of several houses from the project footprint to vacant lots elsewhere in the Malone area and in the nearby Hawley neighborhood. The program saved a small number of buildings that would otherwise have gone to the landfill.¹⁹

The process was more visible than the Radial takings. The logic was the same. The residents along Antelope Creek, most of them renters, most of them in modest single-family homes or small apartment buildings, had minimal organized legal representation against eminent-domain offers. The Lincoln Journal Star published retrospective coverage as the project approached its halfway point and again at completion; both articles quoted Malone-area residents and small-business owners who felt the project had taken more than it had returned. The walking trails, the widened parkway, and the Union Plaza park that replaced their blocks were real public goods. They were not the blocks where those residents had lived.¹³²⁰

Several neighborhood-history sources describe the affected stretch of the Malone neighborhood as “ethnically diverse” by the 2000s. The description is accurate. It also flattens what happened. The Black community that held T-Town between the covenants and the Northeast Radial had already lost much of its residential density by the time the Antelope Valley Project began. The 2005 to 2012 construction completed a process that the Radial takings had begun three decades earlier. The residents the city bought out in the 2000s lived on blocks that the city had already pruned once.²⁰

Image pendingAntelope Valley Parkway construction along the eastern edge of the Malone neighborhood in Lincoln, Nebraska, around 2010.Sought from City of Lincoln InterLinc, 2010

Mexican-American Lincoln

Lincoln’s Mexican-American community is smaller than Omaha’s and more recent in origin. The first sustained Mexican presence in Nebraska arrived with the railroads in the 1900s and 1910s. Track-work crews, whom the community called traqueros, laid and maintained the Burlington, Union Pacific, and Chicago, Burlington and Quincy lines across the state. Most of the work was seasonal. Most of the workers moved between Kansas, Texas, Nebraska, and Iowa with the season and the contract.²¹²²

The Mexican population in Nebraska grew through the 1920s. By 1930, roughly six thousand Mexican-born or Mexican-descended residents lived in the state, most of them in Omaha, South Omaha, Scottsbluff, and Grand Island. Lincoln held a smaller cluster near the Havelock rail yards on the northeast side and along the meatpacking and beet-processing facilities in South Lincoln. The 1930 deportation campaigns cut the state’s Mexican population sharply. Recovery took until the 1970s.²²

The archival record on Mexican-American Lincoln is thinner still than the record on Black Lincoln. History Nebraska’s holdings document the 1910 to 1950 period statewide and preserve the union, mutual-aid, and parish records from Omaha and Scottsbluff. Lincoln-specific material survives primarily in the Havelock neighborhood history and in a handful of parish archives. The neighborhoods the Antelope Valley Project cut through in its northern sections included some of the blocks where later Mexican-American and Central American families had settled in the 1980s and 1990s. The city’s Vietnamese-American community, which arrived in Lincoln as refugees from the 1970s on, lived in adjacent blocks. None of these communities held the kind of institutional anchor the Malone Community Center provided for Black Lincoln. Their displacement during the Antelope Valley construction went largely undocumented outside of individual memory and a small number of Journal Star profile pieces.²²

The Digitization Project and the record ahead

The Malone Community Center and the University of Nebraska–Lincoln Libraries announced the Recovering Lost Stories project in December of 2024. The Council on Library and Information Resources awarded the project two hundred thirty-five thousand one hundred ninety-six dollars under the Digitizing Hidden Collections and Archives: Amplifying Unheard Voices program, which the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funds through CLIR. The three-year program will prepare, digitize, and release approximately six thousand documents and artifacts from the Malone Center’s archive between 2024 and 2027.²³

The collection contains the Urban League’s board minutes from the 1930s through the 1950s, the records of the Clyde Malone Community Center from 1955 forward, photographs of community events and programs, scrapbooks that staff and members assembled, and video footage of neighborhood life from the 1960s and 1970s. The board minutes are the most consequential category for a historian of displacement. They cover the period during which the city acquired properties for the Northeast Radial, during which the University bought the Cushman site, and during which the Antelope Valley Project took its first shape. The minutes will say, in the Center’s own words, what the community heard about each decision and what positions the community took in response. The published scholarship has never had access to that record.

The Center is also soliciting oral histories from current and former Malone-area residents as part of the project. The Center hosts the collection events on U Street, and they aim to build a counterpart to the written archive: first-person accounts of growing up in the neighborhood, of losing a home to the Radial, of going through the Antelope Valley buyouts, and of the institutions that stayed. The Terminal Islanders Club in Los Angeles and the Cooper Square Committee in New York built similar oral-history programs decades earlier. The Malone Center’s program is the first of its scale in Lincoln.

The Atlas will revise the essay as each Recovering Lost Stories release reaches the public. The 2025 releases will add photograph captions and early board minutes. The 2026 releases will add the postwar correspondence and the late-1960s material on the Radial. The 2027 releases will close the twentieth-century record. The second edition of this entry, which the Atlas expects to publish in 2028, will carry what those documents show.

What remains

The Malone neighborhood in 2026 runs roughly from 17th to 27th Street and from Vine to R. The Center stands at 2032 U Street. Quinn Chapel A.M.E. still meets a few blocks south. The Cushman factory is gone. The University’s Innovation Campus occupies the eastern edge. The Antelope Valley Parkway runs along the western edge. The Northeast Radial’s cleared lots, some of which homebuilders rebuilt and some of which remain open as pocket parks, punctuate the interior blocks.

The people who built T-Town have stayed. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren live in Lincoln, in Omaha, and across the Midwest. They have kept the Center running through every municipal administration since Franklin Roosevelt. They have kept Quinn Chapel open. They have driven the Digitization Project forward. The record of Black Lincoln exists because the community and its allies in the University Libraries refused to let the destruction stand as the whole story. The record is thin by the standards of New York or Los Angeles. The record is dense by the standards of Lincoln, Nebraska in 1920. The difference is the work the community did across the eighty years of the interval.

Footnotes

1. Lincoln Journal Star, “Blacks in Nebraska Timeline.” https://journalstar.com/news/local/blacks-in-nebraska-timeline/article_3f0c8ee2-2bc1-57d6-93f5-7c7e51e9fb4a.html ↩

2. University of Nebraska-Lincoln Newsroom, “Project to Digitize History of the Malone Community Center Receives CLIR Grant,” 2024. https://newsroom.unl.edu/announce/libraries/18016/98830 ↩ ↩²

3. Nebraska Today, “Collaborative Project Aims to Digitize Malone Center Archives,” December 2024. https://news.unl.edu/article/collaborative-project-aims-to-digitize-malone-center-archives ↩ ↩²

4. Jim McKee, “A History of African-Americans and Integration in Lincoln,” Lincoln Journal Star. https://journalstar.com/news/state-and-regional/nebraska/jim-mckee-a-history-of-african-americans-and-integration-in-lincoln/article_eebdd970-2ac4-5ab2-aff6-eead34163f40.html ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

5. History Nebraska, “Triumphs and Troubles: The Early History of the NAACP in Nebraska, 1918-1940.” https://history.nebraska.gov/triumphs-and-troubles-the-early-history-of-the-naacp-in-nebraska-1918-1940/ ↩ ↩²

6. History Nebraska, “African American Resources at History Nebraska,” 2024. https://history.nebraska.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/African-American-Resources-updated-Sept-2024.pdf ↩

7. Lincoln Journal Star, “Lincoln Uses Redlining History to Help Guide Its Growth Plans,” 2022. https://journalstar.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/lincoln-uses-redlining-history-to-help-guide-its-growth-plans/article_062fb82b-e259-546f-8111-fe8acf92c7f8.html ↩

8. National Community Reinvestment Coalition, “HOLC ‘Redlining’ Maps: The Persistent Structure of Segregation and Economic Inequality.” https://ncrc.org/holc/ ↩

9. Library of Congress, “The Voice (Lincoln, Nebraska) 1946-195?” https://www.loc.gov/item/2019270505/ ↩

10. Malone Community Center, “About,” 2024. http://malonecenterhistory.com/about ↩ ↩²

11. Malone Community Center History Project, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. https://malonecenterhistory.unl.edu/ ↩

12. City of Lincoln, InterLinc, “Antelope Valley Study: The Big Picture, Traffic Improvements.” https://app.lincoln.ne.gov/city/ltu/projects/antelope/backgrnd/bigpic/traffic.htm ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

13. Lincoln Journal Star, “Antelope Valley Project Past Halfway Mark.” https://journalstar.com/news/local/antelope-valley-project-past-halfway-mark/article_8d81b458-a324-5f50-9485-46552bd1ed2a.html ↩ ↩²

14. David A. Montgomery, Frank A. Pratt, et al., “The Face of Malone: An Area of Transition in Lincoln, Nebraska,” Department of Geography Occasional Papers No. 2, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, May 1972. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/geographyfacpub/32/ ↩

15. Lincoln Journal Star, “Cushman Factory Being Razed by UNL,” March 2014. https://journalstar.com/news/local/education/cushman-factory-being-razed-by-unl/article_b6e44735-d01a-540e-b32c-3cb7f63f6456.html ↩

16. “Antelope Valley Project,” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antelope_Valley_Project ↩ ↩²

17. City of Lincoln, InterLinc, “Antelope Valley Study: The Big Picture, Overview.” https://app.lincoln.ne.gov/city/ltu/projects/antelope/backgrnd/bigpic/overview.htm ↩

18. City of Lincoln, InterLinc, “Antelope Valley Study: The Big Picture, Public Process.” https://app.lincoln.ne.gov/city/ltu/projects/antelope/backgrnd/bigpic/pubproc.htm ↩

19. City of Lincoln, “House Preservation and Infill Program,” Antelope Valley Project. https://app.lincoln.ne.gov/city/ltu/projects/antelope/backgrnd/houspres/pdf/houspres.pdf ↩

20. Lincoln Journal Star, “Was Antelope Valley Worth It? Depends on Who You Ask.” https://journalstar.com/news/local/was-antelope-valley-worth-it-depends-on-who-you-ask/article_5892f819-2143-55da-84f2-cf9ac7d58a85.html ↩ ↩²

21. Jeffrey Marcos Garcilazo, Traqueros: Mexican Railroad Workers in the United States, 1870-1930, University of North Texas Press, 2012. https://untpress.unt.edu/catalog/garcilazo-traqueros/ ↩

22. History Nebraska, “Nebraska’s Mexican Communities, 1910-1950.” https://history.nebraska.gov/nebraskas-mexican-communities-1910-1950/ ↩ ↩² ↩³