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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, Black swimmers were not allowed in the doors at all. In 1936, after the campaign J. Chester Allen and others led — and after the State ordered a schedule for African-American use when the pool reopened from a safety closure — the city relented to one night a week; for the next fourteen years, to 1950, Black use ran on that single weekly allowance. (The day prints with its small conflict whole: Notre Dame's account, Wikipedia and the Commission say Mondays; Jack Reed's Civil Rights Heritage Center oral history remembers "one night a week" without the day; the oral-history detail that the Monday swim fell the night before the pool was drained is legend — the Center notes draining and refilling took three to four days each way.) Allen asked in 1936 that all restrictions be dropped for the city's 5,000-plus citizens of colour; the State Board of Tax Commissioners' representative, John Rothrock, refused simultaneous use. In February 1950 the Allens and Maurice Tulchinsky appeared before the Park Board and threatened suit, and the pool was fully desegregated. It closed in 1978 and reopened in 2010 as the home of the IUSB Civil Rights Heritage Center. The named public-accommodations test case is State of Indiana v. Clarence Kale. The Allens formed a group of lawyers that tried the case expressly to test Indiana's Civil Rights Law: Clarence Kale managed Hook's Drug Stores, which had denied service at the lunch counter to two Black women. Kale was found guilty in City Court in 1941 of violating the law; on appeal the case was retried in Superior Court and ended in a mistrial. The case file survives as correspondence, State of Indiana v. Clarence Kale, 1942, in Michiana Memory at the St. Joseph County Public Library — the disposition printed here is the Commission report's account of it; the court record itself is the settler for any further detail. Around the named case stood the ordinary run of refusals the Commission lists from testimony: Club Oliver (refused to serve Blacks), the Colfax Theater (a designated Black seating area), F.W. Woolworth (refused counter service), S.S. Kresge's (no Blacks at the lunch counters; cups used for Black customers reported painted black at the bottom), The Philadelphia (white-only; its African American janitor could not eat there), W.T. Grant (refused service), the LaSalle Hotel (one account of separate service), Giuseppe's Pizza and Thilman's Tap (refused service) — and the litigation around them: Dr. Bernard Streets and the NAACP's suit to integrate the downtown movie theatres, white ally Tom Singer's case against a local gym that charged African Americans more for memberships, and Jack Reed's memory of being ordered out of Brimmer's Pool Room in the 1950s.
Granger's own houses — tested negative. The row asks after the membership record of this ground's own clubs, Knollwood and Juday Creek. The banked neighbourhoods fragment establishes the seats: Knollwood, a 1975 creation of Adams Road Development Corp. spanning 3,400 home sites, its club approaching its fiftieth anniversary in 2025; Juday Creek Estates in Harris Township, its course opened 1989. Searched: club histories and Tribune coverage for both clubs, and the open web for any membership policy, exclusion case, or civil-rights complaint touching either. Nothing returned — no membership record, exclusionary or otherwise, and no public-accommodations test touching a Granger house was found in any open source. The clubs postdate the era the South Bend cases belong to, and their record, in the sources reached, is silent on race in either direction; the negative is printed at that strength. Settler: Indiana Civil Rights Commission complaint files; the clubs' own membership records (not public).
Sources: South Bend Reparatory Justice Commission, Final Report, History §V.B (Kale at fn. 223–225; Natatorium; business list); Notre Dame Stories, "Changing the Face of Swimming"; City of South Bend Historic Preservation Commission staff report (July 2018, Ord. 10572-17); Jack Reed oral history, IUSB CRHC (1 Aug. 2001); banked neighbourhoods fragment (Knollwood; Juday Creek).