The headline read: “Indiana Black Expo is dropping Circle City Classic.”
The internet responded exactly as it was designed to respond. Outrage. Nostalgia. Accusation. Mourning. Like an AI-built outrage machine, the headline was provocative enough to generate clicks, comments, and condemnation, but shallow enough to avoid the real question: Why?
The headline could have read: “The Cost of Circle City Classic Forces Indiana Black Expo to Pivot.”
But nuance rarely trends. And Black institutions are often denied the complexity routinely afforded to struggling corporations, universities, or professional sports franchises.
Nobody asked about the economics. Nobody asked about the changing landscape of HBCU recruitment. Nobody asked what it costs a nonprofit organization to sustain a football classic in an era where there are now 27 HBCU classics across the country.
Most importantly, nobody asked whether the mission itself had changed.
Because the truth is: Indiana Black Expo was never founded to preserve a football game. It was founded to preserve Black possibility.
For decades, the Circle City Classic served as one of the Midwest’s great cultural gatherings — part reunion, part revival, part pilgrimage, part protest disguised as celebration. Families packed stadiums. Black marching bands turned concrete into a sanctuary. HBCUs became visible in a region where many Black students had never set foot on a campus. In its earliest years, attendance climbed to nearly 60,000 people.
But institutions do not operate outside history. They operate inside economics.
And economics changed.
HBCUs recruit differently now. Students can access schools online instead of waiting for a traveling recruiter to arrive by bus. Name, Image, and Likeness transformed college athletics, and now even high school athletes in Indiana can begin navigating NIL opportunities, branding, and recruitment before graduation. The economics of visibility changed. The marketplace changed. The urgency around exposing students — especially Black students — to educational and athletic pathways changed, too.
Major HBCU programs now play inside NFL stadiums nationwide. There are classics in cities across the country competing for the same audiences and alumni dollars. Meanwhile, nonprofit organizations like IBE are expected to carry the emotional weight of tradition while surviving financial realities that would cripple most corporations.
According to IBE President and CEO Alice Watson, the organization reportedly lost nearly $700,000 on the Classic. The question facing leadership was not whether the mission still mattered. The question was whether the existing business model could survive long enough to continue serving the mission.
There is a difference.
“We have confused preserving the ritual with preserving the purpose,” Watson said.
That may be the real crisis facing many historic Black institutions in America.
Watson’s most piercing observation came quietly during an interview after a community open house and a fireside conversation about IBE’s future.
“No one asked why,” Watson added.
That sentence says more about our political and cultural moment than any press release ever could.
No one asked why attendance declined. No one asked why HBCUs themselves are adapting their recruitment models. No one asked what it means to lead a Black nonprofit organization in a political climate where even the word “Black” has been restricted by the current administration in an effort to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion. Watson revealed that some advised the organization to change its name and distance itself from its mission to protect funding opportunities.
Think about what that means.
An institution born during a period when Blackorganizations had to build parallel systems for survival is now being subtly encouraged to survive by becoming less explicitly Black.
And still, the institution chooses evolution over erosion.
IBE pivots, not away from its mission, but deeper into it. The revised vision for Classic weekend centers students. High school football teams will play inside Lucas Oil Stadium while students engage directly with HBCUs, college recruiters, leadership initiatives, arts programming, financial literacy and career development opportunities. In a moment where student-athletes are increasingly treated as brands before they are adults, IBE’s pivot attempts to place Black students at the intersection of exposure, preparation, and protection.
Youth programs like “Amplify You” and the “Taking Your Seat Leadership Institute” are training young people in civic engagement, leadership and systems thinking.
That work may not trend online. It may never generate the emotional electricity of halftime bands and tailgates. But it addresses something more urgent: survival.
Watson said it plainly: “The work that we do is boring… but we’re trying to save lives.”
That line stayed with me because it exposes a painful truth about how America often consumes Black institutions. Black culture is frequently celebrated while Black infrastructure is neglected. The performance is applauded more readily than the scaffolding holding the performance together. And if we are honest, even within our own communities, we sometimes rally more easily around spectacle than stewardship.
And maybe that is why this moment matters far beyond Indianapolis.
The real question is not whether institutions like IBE or HBCUs remain relevant. The real question is whether America — and even Black communities themselves — are willing to support these institutions as they evolve under extraordinary pressure.
Historic Black institutions have always adapted. They adapted through segregation. Through redlining. Through disinvestment. Through political hostility. Through integration itself, which often stripped Black institutions of resources while demanding they compete in systems never designed for them to win.
Adaptation is not abandonment.
Sometimes adaptation is the only thing standing between preservation and collapse.
Consider the Fourth Amendment. Most Americans will defend it passionately in the abstract. Far fewer have noticed how systematically the conditions protecting its original purpose have been narrowed, reinterpreted and quietly gutted. Too many Black institutions have lived that story. IBE is fighting to make sure it doesn’t become theirs.
So, before we mourn what the Circle City Classic used to be, perhaps we should reckon with what we are actually willing to protect — not in memory, not in nostalgia, but in the unglamorous, underfunded, ongoing work of keeping something alive.
Indiana Black Expo is still doing that work.
The question is whether we will show up for it before there is nothing left to celebrate.
Tasha Jones is an award-winning journalist, poet, and cultural critic who explores language, liberation, identity, fashion, beauty and Blackness.
LaTASHA BOYD JONES
Tasha Jones is a poet, writer, researcher, and educator whose work explores language as a tool for liberation and resistance. She hosts In the Beginning: The Spoken Word Podcast, the #1 spoken word podcast on Apple and Spotify. Tasha is also the Poems & Parables Literary Journal editor and is currently writing Pyramids. Plantations. Projects. Penitentiaries. You can follow her on social media: @iamtashajones, @itbspokenwordpod, and @poemsandparables.
