This is one of the two small abandoned brick buildings that sit side-by-side in the woods on the edge of the Saint Marys River behind the Lawton Park Skateboarding facility in downtown Fort Wayne, Indiana. They were originally built by City Light & Power, the now-defunct electric utility owned by the city until the 1970s.

The graffiti on the door says, "Keep the white race pure. Death to race mixers!" The week before I photographed this, similar racist graffiti appeared on the Martin Luther King Memorial Bridge, which carries Clinton Street across the river just a short distance to the west.

Graffiti like this is rarely seen in Fort Wayne, but the sentiment behind it has a long history in Indiana. Several small towns in Indiana have had reputations as Ku Klux Klan strongholds. As Indiana's second largest city, Fort Wayne has always been more diverse and more tolerant than most of the state.

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by Christopher Crawford

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