A partly cloudy sky Monday could do nothing to damper the beaming pride of a city as it honored one of its brightest stars, former Mayor Richard G. Hatcher, with a rechristening of Grant Street as Richard Gordon Hatcher Boulevard.
Gary Mayor Eddie Melton — just the seventh mayor since Hatcher — recalled seeking the former mayor’s guidance during his first run for public office in 2016.
“So why do we name this street today? We do it because Richard Hatcher Boulevard will be a daily, visible reminder of what is possible,” he said. “It will tell the story of a man who rose from humble beginnings to the highest office in the city, and then used it to fight for justice, to fight for equality and an opportunity for all people.”
Grant Street is one of Gary’s busiest corridors, running directly off Interstate 80/94 and connecting the city to Chicago.
In 1967, Hatcher broke barriers, defying the local machine in a bruising general race, to become one of the first Black mayors of a U.S. city with more than 100,000 residents. Hatcher served two decades and emerged as a national voice on urban policy and civil rights.
That voice carried far beyond City Hall. In March 1972, Hatcher helped bring the National Black Political Convention to West Side High School, a mass convening that produced the Gary Declaration and set out an unapologetically Black political agenda. At the time, Gary did not have a hotel large enough to hold the event, which was ultimately held at West Side High School’s gymnasium. The 50th anniversary of the convention was recently honored in Washington, D.C., during the Congressional Black Caucus
Hatcher paired his politics with a builder’s impatience. As steel employment tumbled, he pursued federal dollars and concrete projects designed to keep the city’s heart beating, pushing downtown redevelopment and airport expansion. The Genesis Convention Center opened in 1981 and aimed to draw events and visitors back into the city’s core.
By the early 1980s, his stature was fully national. He served as president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors and later helped guide Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns, balancing hometown stewardship with a strategist’s reach. For many in Gary, Hatcher’s legacy lives in the institutions he fought to sustain and in the belief that a Black-led Midwestern city could define its own future and insist the nation take notice.
The tribute follows a 2021 statue unveiling and continues the city’s effort to cement Hatcher’s place in Gary’s civic and cultural history. It is part of a broader push to celebrate local legends, including a newly named street for Hall of Fame gymnast Dianne Durham and murals honoring the Jackson 5, Vee-Jay Records, and singer Deniece Williams.
Hatcher’s daughters spoke to not only his love for Gary, but his desire to connect his values to struggles that went beyond the city he loved so dearly.
“It’s important that as we celebrate Richard Gordon Hatcher Day, we also celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day,” said Renee Hatcher, the former mayor’s youngest daughter.
“It would be so important to my father that that be mentioned,” she said. “So much of what he tried to do was to make this country live up to its proclaimed values, to actually wrestle with the history of this country — and that includes the genocide of Indigenous people here on the land that was stolen, and also the enslavement we know of our people. And everything that my father tried to do, he tried to create a more humane, a more just world, and he knew that went beyond Gary.”