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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 whole in Lamanna & Kenny's 1996 report to the Human Rights Commission: South Bend's Black population ran 3,555 (3.5 percent) in 1940, 8,134 (7.0) in 1950, 12,955 (9.8) in 1960, 17,737 (14.1) in 1970, 20,066 (18.3) in 1980 and 22,049 (20.9) in 1990 — while the remainder of St. Joseph County, all the townships together, held 147 Black residents in 1940 and only 2,141 in 1990. In 1940, 96.0 percent of the county's Black residents lived inside South Bend; in 1990, still 91.1 percent. The ceiling inside the plants is counted in incidents, as the row directs. At Bendix Aviation, J. Chester Allen persuaded the company to hire its first six Black workers, all men, in 1941, assisted by President Roosevelt's June 1941 executive order barring discrimination at defence contractors; by November 1941 Bendix had only 19 Black employees in a workforce of seven thousand. In the industrial sewing class, Lucille Sneed and a handful of young Black women were refused instruction outright — "There's no need to teach you how to use these machines because you're not going to get a job" — while the teacher taught the white women, who were hired at Studebaker's, Singer's and other plants within a week or so; Hering House intervened, the Black women were taught, and Sneed's training let her keep her Studebaker job. No Black teacher worked in a South Bend school until 1950. When the Kingsbury Ordnance Plant in LaPorte County hired Black women during the war, South Bend women carpooled to it despite the danger — Vera Lane, Margaret Morgan ("I worked stuffing the shells with gunpowder… but I would have rather stuffed gunpowder than clean houses for a living"), and Annette Brodie, who lost fingers and was burned in an explosion. Studebaker was the city's biggest employer of Black workers; many factories refused to hire Black workers at all.
Granger's arrival is a different story, and it is counted, not asserted. Lamanna & Kenny's township table (whole townships, including their city portions) counts Black residents in Clay Township at 45 in 1960, 51 in 1970, 475 in 1980 and 881 in 1990 (2.8 percent of 31,033 in 1990); Harris Township at 0 in 1960, 8 in 1970, 26 in 1980 and 77 in 1990 (0.7 percent of 11,543). The arrival decade in Clay is the 1970s — 51 to 475 — the decade Knollwood was platted. For the CDP itself, the same report's Table 3 counts 223 Black residents in 1990 (1.1 percent of 20,241; Clay part 150 of 8,764, Harris part 73 of 11,477), on the report's own definition of Granger as the unincorporated ground in Clay east of Ironwood Road and north of the Toll Road, plus unincorporated Harris. That 1990 figure settles the banked population fragment's named gap GAP-POP-4, which had left the CDP's 1990 Black count unpinned. The CDP series then runs on banked counts: 223 (1990) → 493 (2000) → 773 (2010) → 1,003 (2020). The migration half of this row therefore closes as a suburbanisation: when Black families came to Granger, whence the city record says they came is the South Bend industrial community itself, spilling outward once the plants' own colour line — and the housing line drawn around it (art-68-8, art-68-9) — began to crack.
Sources: Timothy J. Kenny & Richard A. LaManna, Racial and Ethnic Diversity and Change in the South Bend–Mishawaka Metropolitan Area, report to the South Bend Human Rights Commission (Nov. 1996), Tables 2, 3, 5, 6, 7 (archive.org, CRHC.LAMANNA.018); South Bend Reparatory Justice Commission, Final Report, History §§II–III (Bendix count; Sneed testimony; Kingsbury testimony); Gordon (1922); banked population and businesses fragments.