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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 Fisk, took a Yale Divinity degree in 1917, served in the First World War, and added a University of Chicago M.Div. He came to South Bend in December 1920 as pastor of Taylor A.M.E. Zion Church (now First A.M.E. Zion), at Eddy and Campeau Streets just south of Notre Dame, and in 1922 he self-published The Negro in South Bend: A Social Study — one of the few, if not the only, contemporary works to tackle racism in the city head-on, modelled on Du Bois's The Philadelphia Negro, which Gordon had effectively replicated for his own city: early Black settlers, the Powell case at ten pages, the migration northward, the Black churches, the Masonic organisations, living and social conditions. Gordon counted 604 Negroes in South Bend as of the First World War — "there was no racial problem since there were so few Negroes" — and tracked the population doubling 1910–1920 and nearly tripling 1920–1922, with fewer than twenty Black students in the city's high schools against a Black population he estimated over 3,000. Du Bois spoke at Gordon's church in January 1922 on the Pan-African Congress; Gordon preached "The Quest of Restless Souls" there on 5 March 1922. The book had institutional consequences: its publication led directly to Frank and Claribel Hering's donation that created Hering House (art-68-6). Gordon left South Bend in 1925 for Akron, Ohio, and later became a bishop of the A.M.E. Zion Church (Ninth District); he died in 1952. The book was republished by Wolfson Press in 2009, edited by David H. Healey (ISBN 978-0-9799532-4-8), and it is still load-bearing: the Reparatory Justice Commission relied on it heavily a century later — "We rely a lot on Buford's book," Commission Vice Chair Judith Fox told the Tribune (5 October 2026).
The shelf Gordon founded is the community's own and its neighbours', and it is cited here as a source class in its own right: Lisa Swedarsky, A Place with Purpose: Hering House 1925–1963 (Wolfson Press, 2009); Katherine O'Dell, Our Day: Race Relations and Public Accommodations in South Bend, Indiana (Wolfson Press, 2010, ISBN 978-0-9799532-7-9); Gabrielle Robinson, Better Homes of South Bend: An American Story of Courage (History Press, 2015); and George Garner, Placing History: An African American Landmark Tour of South Bend, Indiana (2023, 213 pp., 17 sites), built from the IUSB Civil Rights Heritage Center's Oral History Collection of 170-plus interviews and more than 2,500 Tribune and News-Times articles — the AALT web tour used throughout this section is its online form. The underlying archives sit at the Civil Rights Heritage Center: the Hering House records (donated December 2012 by Bill and Carla Maureen Roberts), the Allen papers, the Brookins v. SBCSC collection, and the South Bend Civil Rights History collection (finding aid, 71 pp., rev. 2.3f, April 2020; collection at archives.iu.edu VAE1890, open for research with advance notice). Granger has no separate scholarly literature of its own — no history of Black Clay or Harris Township exists as a work — and that absence is itself the township-sized fact: the community whose scholarship this is is the county's Black community, seated in South Bend.
Sources: Kevin Tidmarsh, "The Forgotten Legacy of Buford Gordon," Belt Magazine (3 Mar. 2016); Wikipedia, "Buford F. Gordon"; Indiana Magazine of History, review of the Wolfson reissue (Dec. 2010, Vol. 106 No. 4); IUSB Civil Rights Heritage Center collection finding aids (VAE1890; VAE2092); South Bend Tribune, examination of the Reparatory Justice Commission report (5 Oct. 2026).