The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
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 twenty-year-old Church of Christ, Scientist building on Division Street (present-day Western Avenue, 726/745 W. Western Ave.) in 1924 and paid to move it, and the settlement house, modelled on Chicago's Hull House, was dedicated on 8 March 1925 under a declaration of trust as a community centre for "the colored people of South Bend, Indiana, for their religious, educational, recreational and social welfare activities." J. Chester Allen chaired its management committee. In 1931, in the Depression's depth, Hering House provided 4,678 meals to unemployed African Americans, plus clothes, lodging and medical aid; the H.T. Burleigh Music Association under Josephine Curtis mounted annual operas and concerts; B.G. Smith (Beverley Graustark Smith, born Missouri 1890, arrived 1928) directed it from 1928. Two conflicts print whole. The founding board's composition: the IUSB archives account gives two of seven members as persons of colour; Clio's entry gives nine of twelve white; Belt Magazine gives five of seven white — three printings, no reconciliation reached. The closing date: Clio and the IUSB account give 1963; The History Museum gives 1965. The house's records, donated to the IUSB Civil Rights Heritage Center in December 2012, and Swedarsky's A Place with Purpose (2009) are the settling sources. The South Bend branch of the NAACP was founded in 1919 at Mount Zion Baptist Church — founded 1890 as the city's first African American Baptist church under Rev. W.M. Ridley, first at Main and Jefferson, moved in 1891 to 116 North Birdsell Street, its present sanctuary built on a 1921 foundation and completed 1926; reorganised in 1935, it was renamed Pilgrim Baptist Church. Olivet A.M.E. hosted early NAACP meetings. The branch's own files sit in the NAACP records at the Library of Congress (Box 66, folder 1934–1948; Box C57, South Bend 1940–1945).
The lawyer couple's thirty years of cases is the Allens' record. J. Chester Allen Sr. came to South Bend in 1929, was admitted to the bar in 1930, and was appointed County Poor Attorney in 1931. Elected to the Indiana House in 1938 and 1940, serving 1939–1941, he was the first African American from the South Bend area elected to the state legislature; his Fair Employment Protection Act (H.B. 445) was defeated. On 1 June 1941 Governor Schricker appointed him Negro Activities Coordinator of the Indiana Defense Council, and his Bi-Racial Cooperation work opened defence jobs statewide. His firm, Allen & Allen, was established in 1939 at 115 S. Lafayette Blvd. (Indiana Historical Bureau marker 71.2020.2, installed 2020). In 1959 he was elected South Bend's first Black councilman, and in 1966 its first Black school board member. Elizabeth Fletcher Allen, whom he married on 6 March 1928 at Plaistow, New Hampshire, was the first Black woman attorney in South Bend and in Indiana, admitted in 1938; she founded the local Red Cross nurse's aid training and placement programme for Black women in the early 1940s, advised the NAACP's Legal Redress Committee, and served as Judge Pro Tem in the South Bend city courts (recognised 1953, 1955, 1960) — the Commission adds that she was the first African American woman to sit as a Superior Court judge pro tem in South Bend. Two conflicts print whole. J. Chester's law school: the Indiana Historical Bureau gives Boston University; the South Bend Alumni account gives Boston College. Elizabeth's legislative service: Wikipedia states she "represented St. Joseph county in the Indiana House of Representatives from 1939 until 1943," while the marker and Bureau record give the House seat, 1939–1941, to J. Chester. Both print; neither is silently picked. The case record, run together: the 1931 petition with B.G. Smith and Rev. I.K. Merchant to the Park Board over the Natatorium; the 1935 prosecution of a white restaurant owner who refused to serve Charles H. Wills, Justice of the Peace, in the whites-only section, J. Chester prosecuting; the 1935 Citizens Committee case over the police shooting of Arthur Owens, 18, by white officer Fred Miller; the 1936 challenge to the Natatorium ban, petition to the State Board of Tax Commissioners, likely prepared by Elizabeth; the Kale test case of 1941–42 (art-68-7), which Elizabeth's lawyer group tried and whose original complaint tradition assigns to her drafting hand — her name absent from the official Natatorium documents, whether because she was still in law school or because her involvement as a Black woman was kept backstage to protect the cause; and the 1950 appearance with Maurice Tulchinsky before the Park Board that ended the Natatorium's segregation outright (art-68-7). Around them stood the rest of the institutional suite: the St. Pierre Ruffin Club (women's, founded 1900), the Literature, Art, and Research Club, and the Sanhedrin Club. None of it was seated in Clay or Harris Township; the townships built no counterpart institutions, and none is claimed.
Sources: South Bend Reparatory Justice Commission, Final Report, History §§II–V; Clio entries, Hering House and Pilgrim Baptist Church; Indiana Landmarks; Indiana Historical Bureau marker 71.2020.2 (Allen & Allen); Indiana History Blog (J. Chester Allen); IUSB Civil Rights Heritage Center finding aids; SBAGS obituary record (Vagner, cross-referenced in art-68-10).