Since leaving office at the end of his second term, Dwight D. Eisenhower had been living in retirement at a farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Although busy in 1967 with the publication of his final book, At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends, Eisenhower took the time to write a personal letter to a former Indianapolis schoolteacher. From a number of sources, the former president told the teacher, he had learned of an effort in the Hoosier capital to clean and better the community's neighborhoods. "Not only have I been impressed by your common sense philosophy," Eisenhower said, "but even more by the patriotism, energy and organizing ability that are so evident in the record you have made." He went on to offer the hope that as knowledge of Coney's success spread, she and her achievements would "become examples for every city in our land."
The former GOP president was one of many, among them Lady Bird Johnson and Gerald Ford, to lavish accolades on the efforts of Mattie Coney and the grassroots organization she helped create: Citizens Forum. Working in concert with her husband, Elmo, and countless Indianapolis residents and civic leaders, Coney attempted through her "Better Neighbor" program to encourage good citizenship, individual responsibility, and self improvement in inner-city neighborhoods. From its inception in 1964 to its disbanding twenty years later, Citizens Forum, a racially integrated institution, organized thousands of block clubs throughout the city that embarked on such projects as the "De-RAT-ification" campaign, to rid the city of rodents; the "Dogwood Tree" program, to plant trees; the "Visit Your Neighbor Month"; a citywide beautification program to remove trash from streets and yards; and a "Helping Hand" program, inaugurated in 1973 to provide children safe havens on their way to and from school. Impressed with Citizens Forum's results, other cities--Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, New Orleans, New York, and Washington, D.C.--began similar programs.
The driving force behind the successful neighborhood improvement association was Mattie Coney, known throughout central Indiana and the country for her stylish headgear, blunt opinions, and no-nonsense philosophies known as "Mattieisms." Her outspokenness on the need for blacks to "quit feeling sorry for ourselves and take advantage of our opportunities" and her belief that "slums are made by people, not by plaster or bricks," often put her at odds with both white and black leaders struggling to achieve equal rights for African American citizens during the 1960s, who viewed her as a willing tool of an establishment seeking to place the blame for poverty and racism on blacks themselves instead of on unfair laws. Coney, who died in 1988 at the age of seventy-nine, utilized a different approach than those used by such nationally renowned civil rights proponents as the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. or more radical groups like the Black Panthers. "I never believed in the need for marching, cussing, fussing and breaking up stuff," said Coney. She acknowledged that not everyone agreed with her methods. "Many Negroes don't like what I'm saying," she said, noting that some went as far as to call her Aunt Jemima. "They think I'm blaming them. I'm not. I'm talking about all people, and if they happen to live in filth, then they ought to clean it up. I just tell the truth." To Coney, a registered Republican, those who criticized her, white and black alike, did so because they liked to "talk about what's wrong, not what's right and how to make it better."
Born in Gallatin, Tennessee, on 30 May 1909, Mattie Coney was an only child. When she was six weeks old, her family moved to Indianapolis, where her mother and father eventually divorced. Her mother, Delia, a cook, later married Oscar Weathers, a hod carrier (a worker responsible for carrying supplies to bricklayers, stonemasons, or plasterers) whose father served as the business agent for a hod carriers union. The family lived in a two-story house west of Indiana Avenue. One of Coney's vivid memories from her youth was sitting on the lap of union leader John L. Lewis, who was visiting her grandparents, and playing with his bushy eyebrows. "I always talked about what I had on my mind. . . . They always listened to what I had to say, even Mr. Lewis," she said. Also at an early age, Coney learned from her family the importance of hard work and self-reliance. "Our family always believed in the free enterprise system," she said, noting that one uncle owned a milk business, two operated stands in the city market, one ran a successful barbershop, and another had the largest hot tamale business in town.
Delia Weathers in particular attempted to instill in her daughter the importance of doing well at anything she attempted. "She always taught me," said her daughter, "to be courteous and friendly with elders and [to] be helpful." Coney told an Indianapolis Star reporter that she had to wear glasses years later because her mother would deliberately tell people that if they wanted any errands run or needed a needle threaded to call on her daughter. "I used to be the best needle threader in my end of town and now I can't even see the needle," she joked. Her mother also taught her to look beyond a person's looks or skin color. "My philosophy, like hers, is that there is some good in everybody," said Coney.
After graduating from Shortridge High School in 1927, Coney put herself through a two-year teachers training course at Butler University by delivering newspapers and working at the Ayres Tea Room. Embarking on a teaching career that would span more than thirty years, her first assignment was a class of fifty-five supposed incorrigible children, which she soon turned into a group of model students with her own brand of education. Throughout her days with the Indianapolis public schools, she stressed solutions to the everyday practical problems facing her students. For example, many pupils in a fourth-grade class Coney taught were unable to spell their own names because they were used to being called by their nicknames. For a spelling lesson, she had the students learn how to write their first names and then their surnames. Their next assignment was to bring in slips of paper with their mothers' names. If a student forgot or were too timid to complete the task, she simply solved the difficulty "by asking Jimmy to go over to Billy's house and get the name of Billy's mother on a slip of paper. Then I would ask Billy to reciprocate by visiting Jimmy's house and getting the name of Jimmy's mother." Along with her spelling assignments, Coney emphasized the importance of cleanliness to her students--a lesson she stressed time and time again during her days with Citizens Forum.
Coney's students had fond memories of their teacher in later years, in spite of the often strict discipline she employed in the classroom. "She was my fourth grade teacher and I thought she hated me because she got after me all the time," said Pat Browne who became a teacher herself. "It took me until I was a senior in high school to realize the impact she had on my life." Browne noted that students thrived in the atmosphere Coney created because "she expected you to live up to your potential. When you got out of her class, you knew you were one of the best. You stood a little taller." She particularly remembered one incident during a school play about the Pilgrims and Indians where she played the role of a grandmother. Coney helped Browne achieve a little more realistic look for the part by graying her hair with powder. "She always gave us her time," Browne said of her former teacher. "She wanted us to be perfect."
That quest for perfection continued to drive Coney when she became involved with the creation of Citizens Forum. The inner-city neighborhood group evolved from a 9 July 1964 meeting held to discuss an open-housing ordinance being considered by the Indianapolis City Council. The ordinance prohibited real-estate agents from refusing to show homes or negotiate sales or rentals based on a person's race, creed, color, or national origin. According to Coney, City Councilman Rufus C. Kuykendall, who sponsored the ordinance along with Reverend James Cummings, stopped by her home one evening to lament that realtors were using the alleged poor conditions of black neighborhoods as a wedge against the ordinance. Coney helped organize a citywide meeting of prominent black and white citizens held at the Fall Creek YMCA. "It was my hope," she said of the meeting, "that we could talk among ourselves and work some of these problems out. It seemed to me that if I were a good citizen there shouldn't be any reason because of my color, which I didn't have anything to do with, that I couldn't move into a neighborhood that was more comfortable."
Working with her husband Elmo, a former Gary resident and a salesman and distributor for Fuller Products Company, Coney started efforts to improve area neighborhoods by organizing block clubs. "We aimed our campaigns at the neighborhoods and set up three principles--simplicity, truth and responsibility," she said. By first educating block-club workers on how to become good citizens, Coney reasoned, they could, in turn, pass on those lessons through meetings at their homes. Members also kept an eye out on their neighborhoods, reporting health hazards and possible code violations to the proper city department as well as welcoming new residents to the area. Leslie Lott, a member of a block club on the east side of Indianapolis, remembered Mattie Coney as a "person who believed in getting things done. When she talked, people listened."
Citizens Forum distributed its self-improvement message through numerous publications, including a pamphlet outlining ten points for being a good citizen. These suggestions for making Indianapolis a better place to live included the following: keep your property neat and attractive; conduct yourself in a quiet and dignified manner; keep yourself well groomed; respect your neighbor's property; keep noise at a minimum; be alert and guard against degrading influences; instruct your children in neighborhood pride, decorum, and respect; and set a good example. The group's efforts bore fruit. In 1966 the five hundred block clubs organized under the Citizens Forum banner gathered approximately 40,000 tons of trash from Indianapolis homes, streets, and yards. The next year, the amount of refuse grew to 180,000 tons removed during a twenty-eight-day period. What made the program successful according to Coney was its simplicity--"anybody can clean up their homes and be good citizens," she said.
The organization grew by leaps and bounds in those first few years, forcing Coney to retire from teaching in order to devote herself full-time as Citizens Forum's executive secretary. She was able to take such a drastic step due in part to financial support from Lilly Endowment (the Coneys stayed up one night until four in the morning writing a constitution for Citizens Forum to qualify for the Lilly grant), other foundations, and individual contributions. Coney also had the assistance of her husband, who quit his job with the Fuller firm to work with his wife. "I thought she had a good idea, she was my wife and I was determined that she would be a success," said Elmo Coney, who served as project coordinator with the citizens group until ill health forced him to retire in 1982. Throughout the couple's years with Citizens Forum, Mattie Coney supplied the philosophy, said Elmo Coney, while he worked on programming.
A flood of improvement projects poured from Citizens Forum's office. A "Go One Step Farther" campaign urged residents to sweep a foot beyond the curb to help prevent drainage problems; a "De-RAT-ification" effort worked to eliminate places where rats bred, nested, and ate; and a "Bloom-In" program encouraged those who had surplus seeds and flowers to donate them for redistribution. The group also served as a liaison between local residents and various city-government agencies. These efforts garnered for Citizens Forum, and for Mattie Coney, numerous state and national honors, including a special national award from the Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge and a Recognition Award from the Keep America Beautiful program. Other cities copied the group's neighborhood-improvement and crime-control programs, something that Mattie Coney called "the sincerest form of flattery."
After years of dedicated service to the Citizens Forum cause, the Coneys, faced with ill health, both retired from the organization in the early 1980s. Without the Coneys' leadership, and plagued by financial problems, Citizens Forum disbanded in 1984. Ironically, the organization's success may have helped lead to its downfall. As city government began to take over some aspects of Citizens Forum's programs—heavy trash pickup and neighborhood beautification, for example—grants and contributions began to wane. Mattie Coney's legacy of self-help and improvement, however, remains intact. As she said when asked about her work when she and her husband were presented the keys to the city in 1983, her greatest accomplishment was "getting people to realize you have to do something for yourself. The Declaration of Independence promises the pursuit of happiness. You got to work for it."
Ray Boomhower is the Indiana Historical Society's public relations coordinator and a contributing editor for Traces. His articles have appeared in the Indiana Magazine of History, Michigan History, and Outdoor Indiana. His biography of Indiana historian Jacob Piatt Dunn Jr. will be published by the Society in 1998.
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