COMMUNITY

MARY CLARK: A Woman

Shrinking the globe in Indianapolis, Indiana

By Emily Longnecker

At first, 42nd and Lafayette Road may seem like the last place you would expect to discover all the cultures that the world has to offer. In fact, you might even feel like you’re not in Indianapolis anymore — but you are, standing in the city’s new westside Global Village Center.

“We hope when people walk through the doors, the first thing they say is, ‘Wow! I didn’t know a place like this existed,’” says Mary Clark, the executive director of The International Marketplace Coalition who led the center’s creation and is now its director.

Although it opened in March during the COVID-19 pandemic, the center is planning to host a grand opening in October. It is a place where people can meet others whom they would never normally see and meet. The building has even received visits from ambassadors and consul generals.

If an old furniture store on the westside seems like an unlikely place to host foreign dignitaries, you need to have a look inside the 5,500-square-foot building. On display are artifacts and cultural pieces from almost 90 countries, featuring everything from ceremonial masks from Ghana and Australia to a bull statue from India and a hanbok from South Korea.

“Here on the westside of Indianapolis, we’re finding ways to shrink the globe and create a village,” explains Mary.

She adds that the village really started growing in the mid90s, when the area around the once-popular Lafayette Square Mall started to change and any crime that occurred there received widespread media attention.

“We started getting this little stigma about us being a bad place, and so businesses began to leave,” Mary remembers. “But, you know what happened? Our immigrant brothers and sisters started moving to Indianapolis around the same time.”

As traditional businesses started leaving what they perceived to be a declining area, immigrants began to move in

with a Calling

and take over the storefronts of the strip mall along Lafayette Square Road. At the time, Mary was working as the manager of a bank branch in the area, and she admits that she wasn’t happy about the changing demographics at first.“All of these ugly stereotypes were stirring up in me, but I never said it out loud.” But one day, when she decided to share some of her thoughts with a co-worker, the response stopped Mary in her tracks:

“Mary, who do you think you are? Don’t you know, they’re God’s children, just like you.”

Mary didn’t know it then, but she now sees that time as the day God started to soften her heart and prepare her for what she is doing now.

Mary’s current path started more than 60 years ago, while she grew up in a segregated city in which she was part of the first integrated class at Crispus Attucks High School.

“I grew up in an era where in Riverside Park, I could only go on Thursdays,” she explains.

Decades later, Mary would find herself helping lead the westside’s transition from an area once filled with traditional chain restaurants and a thriving mall to one tthat, today, boasts more than 120 ethnic restaurants — so many that, in 2008, the, the Lafayette Square Area Coalition changed its name to The International Marketplace Coalition.

“God said, ‘We’re not going to stay traditional. We’re going to make a place where everybody is welcome,’” Mary explains. In what felt like an overnight transition, she says the area where she lived and worked became a melting pot of cultures.

Having never been outside the United States, Mary laughs at the irony and plans to travel internationally in the next few years, but, in the meantime, she revels in the global community all around her. Visitors to the area can go to China, Japan, Greece, Guatemala, Mexico or Ethiopia in just one block.

“Why would you not embrace this? This is beauty. This is like God’s work,” Mary exclaims.

It’s work that has brought her to a place that she could have never imagined 15 years ago. “I would have said, ‘No, you’re crazy,’” she laughs. “This would have been so out of my comfort zone.”

But today, it is exactly where Mary feels most at home, and now she can’t imagine not being part of a global family that isn’t inclusive of everyone.

“We’re showing that our differences aren’t so different,” she explains about the impact of the Global Village Welcome Center. “If we all just take the time to talk to one another, we can learn that we aren’t so different.”

This is what Mary has learned, and this is what she hopes that others will learn as well when they visit the center and see all it has to offer.

“Just walk through the doors and discover your neighbor,” she says with a smile. “We can’t love ourselves if we don’t love each other. It’s really that simple.” Z

Why would you not embrace this? This is beauty. This is like God’s work.

Emily Longnecker is a 7 time Emmy Award Winning reporter at WTHR-TV, covering breaking & general assignment news. You can follow her on Instagram @emilywthr.