Malone Community Center

The Malone Community Center opened in 1942 as the Lincoln Urban League Community Center, built on donations the Jewish department-store owner Nathan Gold organized alongside the Community Chest and a federal matching grant. The board renamed the building and the organization in 1955 for Clyde Malone, the Urban League director who ran it through the war years until his death in 1951.

The Center is the only institution in Lincoln that has served Black residents continuously from the 1930s forward. Programs today include youth development, early-childhood education, senior services, food distribution, and community events. The building at 2032 U Street has stayed constant across more than eighty years of construction and reconstruction.

The Center holds the archive of Black Lincoln. The Recovering Lost Stories project, a three-year collaboration with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries funded through a Council on Library and Information Resources grant the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation supports, is digitizing roughly six thousand documents and artifacts between 2024 and 2027. The collection includes Urban League board minutes from the 1930s forward, photographs, scrapbooks, and video of neighborhood life through the Northeast Radial and Antelope Valley decades. The Center is also collecting first-person oral histories from current and former Malone-area residents.