Historian David Leander Williams has built on his previous works documenting the city’s jazz and rhythm-and-blues legacies with “African Americans in Indianapolis: The Story of a People Determined to Be Free,” published by Indiana University Press. It covers the 150-year period between 1820 and 1970—from the establishment of the Black community on the banks of the White River after a ruinous flood and malaria epidemic to the destruction of Black neighborhoods due to the construction of Interstate-65 through downtown and the expansion of IUPUI.

In this week’s edition of the IBJ Podcast, Williams discusses his personal connections to some of the key figures and places in the Black community, including jazz legend Wes Montgomery, the Bethel AME Church and Crispus Attucks High School. He also explains the clever ways he was able to reconstruct Black life in the city’s first decades, when record keeping was rare. And he pinpoints the ways the Black community has been set back economically, including the loss of thousands upon thousands of jobs in the city’s manufacturing sector that once served as passports to the middle class.