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Black History
Granger is a postwar suburb seated in two rural townships, Clay and Harris, and its Black history has to be written at two sizes at once. The townships' own record is dug first and printed at its true size: in 1850 the townships returned no Black residents at all, and Black families arrive in the counted record only with the subdivision era. The larger record — the freedom case, the Klan fight, the institutions, the pool, the covenants, the school decree — is St. Joseph County's, centred in South Bend, and it is imported here at boundary size only where a section row directs it, labelled as boundary material wherever it appears, with the Granger share stated each time. The principal sources are the South Bend Reparatory Justice Commission's Final Report (empanelled by the Common Council 28 September 2023; the report is dated 5 March 2026 and was filed with the City Clerk on 4 May 2026), Lamanna & Kenny's 1996 diversity report to the South Bend Human Rights Commission, the Indiana University South Bend African American Landmark Tour (AALT) and the Civil Rights Heritage Center's collection finding aids, the South Bend Tribune record, and the federal census volumes. Conflicts between sources print whole.
First families of record: the Black Laws, the county's first settlement, and the Powell freedom case
1787–1850 · ST. JOSEPH COUNTY, WITH THE TOWNSHIPS' OWN LINE PRINTED AT ITS TRUE SIZE
Indiana was technically a free state — the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and the state constitution of 1816 both banned slavery — and practically a closed one. The Reparatory Justice Commission's report collects the Black Laws…
The community's own scholarship: Buford Gordon's 1922 study and the shelf it founded
1922–2023 · SOUTH BEND (BOUNDARY — THE COUNTY COMMUNITY'S OWN RECORD)
The pattern the leg table names is Rev. Buford Franklin Gordon. Born 21 August 1893 in Pulaski, Tennessee — the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan — to a father born into slavery and an illiterate mother, Gordon studied chemistry at…
Migration and the industrial ceiling, counted together — and Granger's different arrival
1910–2020 · THE CITY'S FOUNDRY MIGRATION AT BOUNDARY SIZE; THE TOWNSHIPS' ARRIVAL AT FULL SIZE
The Great Migration reached South Bend's foundries in two waves. Gordon's counts frame the first: the city's Black population doubled 1910–1920 and nearly tripled 1920–1922, drawn by wartime industry. The second wave is counted…
The Klan era: the guarded church, the county chapter, and a township test that returns nothing
1922–1925 · SOUTH BEND AND THE COUNTY AT BOUNDARY SIZE; CLAY AND HARRIS TESTED
In the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan essentially governed Indiana: Governor Edward L. Jackson was a Klansman, and as many as one-third of all White Protestant men in the state were members. St. Joseph County's chapter, the Reparatory…
Institutions built: Hering House, the NAACP branch, and the Allens' thirty years of cases
1919–1966 · SOUTH BEND (BOUNDARY — NO INSTITUTION OF THIS SUITE WAS EVER SEATED IN THE TOWNSHIPS)
Hering House came out of Gordon's book. Frank Hering — Notre Dame history and economics professor, the school's first basketball and baseball coach and its third football coach (1896–98) — and his wife Claribel bought a…
Exclusion measured in years: the Natatorium's fourteen and fourteen, the Kale test case, and the clubs on this ground
1922–1950 · SOUTH BEND AT BOUNDARY SIZE; GRANGER'S OWN CLUBS TESTED
The Engman Public Natatorium, 1040 W. Washington Street, South Bend, opened in 1922 as the largest indoor pool in Indiana, and the exclusion can be timed both ways, as the row directs. For its first fourteen years, 1922–1936…
Redlining in writing: the HOLC sheets quoted, Colpaert named, sixty-eight plats counted — and the plat books named as the settler for this ground
1922–1968 · SOUTH BEND FILE AT BOUNDARY SIZE; GRANGER'S SHARE STATED AT THE END
The Home Owners' Loan Corporation was created in 1933; its Mortgage Rehabilitation Division began the City Survey in 1935 for cities over 40,000 people, and South Bend was one. Local officials and real estate professionals helped…
Counter-moves, dated: separate defence housing, twenty-two couples in secret, a mapped district, and the March 1968 ordinance
1941–1968 · SOUTH BEND AT BOUNDARY SIZE; THE TOWNSHIPS' OWN TEST AT THE END
Defence housing was built separately, and it is counted. South Bend's council refused a housing authority in 1939; the authority created in 1941 existed only to support defence-worker housing, and its first two projects were…
Professions inside segregation: the doctors and nurses who practised inside the segregated hospitals, named
1929–2021 · SOUTH BEND AT BOUNDARY SIZE; GRANGER SEATS TESTED
The doctors are named in the order Dr. Roland Chamblee, who arrived in 1953, gave them: William Smith, the first; Dr. Mott, the second; Milton Butts, the third; Dr. Samuel Bernard Vagner; Lawrence Bell; and Chamblee himself. One…
Schools as the long fight: from a ceiling's collapse to a decree still alive in 2025 — and the test of Penn-Harris-Madison
1890–2026 · SOUTH BEND AT BOUNDARY SIZE; CLAY TOWNSHIP'S OWN PART PRINTED; PHM TESTED
South Bend never adopted an explicit segregation statute for its schools; its "neighbourhood school" policy and intentionally drawn boundaries did the work, and Linden School, Linden and Adams Streets (opened 1 September 1890)…
Unrest, firsts, the Black press, displacement counted — and the reparatory accounting, dated
1967–2026 · SOUTH BEND AT BOUNDARY SIZE; GRANGER'S SHARE AND THE PRESENT RECORD STATED
Racial unrest struck South Bend's west side 25–28 July 1967. On 26 July, outside the LaSalle Neighborhood Center at 2910 W. Western Avenue, Melvin Phillips — a young Black man, a local high school sports star — was shot by a…