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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 numbering conflict prints whole: Chamblee's sequence makes Vagner the fourth Black doctor in the city, while Vagner's obituary calls him the sixth African-American physician in South Bend but its first African-American surgeon. Also named in the early record: Dr. Hickman, Dr. Fears and Dr. Foreman. Vagner's own course carries the era: born 28 October 1917 in Alexandria, Louisiana; Meharry Medical College, 1943, in the top tenth of his class, in a period when, he recalled, medical schools accepting Black students admitted twice as many freshmen as there were sophomore places and dismissed half regardless of grades, a dismissal barring application anywhere else; internship and residency at Homer G. Phillips Hospital in St. Louis; arrived in South Bend in 1949; first office above the Rexall Drugstore at Washington and Walnut Streets until 1963, then an office he built at Lincolnway West and Huey Street. He held surgical staff privileges at St. Joseph Hospital; Memorial would not allow him on its surgical staff, medical staff only. His practice was integrated — mostly Black, Hungarian and Polish patients — and ran 28 years in private practice and 28 more as a staff physician at the University of Notre Dame. He was the first African American invited to join the South Bend Rotary, kept fifty years of perfect attendance, and died 18 September 2021, aged 103. When Chamblee arrived in 1953, both local hospitals were segregated. St. Joseph Hospital desegregated its patients first; Memorial followed two years later; another five years passed before Memorial had a Black intern, and St. Joseph had only one — Lawrence Bell. Some white doctors refused Black patients outright, and the surgical dressing room ran on racial jokes. The nurses are named the same way: Charlotte Huddleston, the only African American Licensed Practical Nurse at Memorial Hospital in the late 1960s, whose patients used the slur to her face and refused her care while staff treated her as lesser; Bobbie Durant, rejected by both St. Joseph and Memorial — the Memorial director, on her first application, "didn't know how it would be to work at a hospital with black nurses"; and Helen Pope, who made it her mission to stay in those hospitals to hold the door for the Black nurses behind her (her husband James Pope worked the postal service and later owned a Linden Avenue barbershop; a scholarship at IU South Bend carries her name). Black patients avoided Memorial, then Epworth, "because they knew the reputation"; St. Joseph carried more Black patients and staff. Beside them: Dr. Bernard Streets, one of the city's first Black dentists (Indiana University School of Dentistry, 1929), whose west-side office later moved to West Washington Street, who taught himself Polish to serve his Polish clients, and who with his wife Odie Mae helped revive the NAACP in 1930 — and Elizabeth Fletcher Allen's Red Cross nurse's aid programme of the early 1940s, which trained and placed Black women the hospitals would not (art-68-6).
Granger seats — tested negative. The banked health fragment names no physician, surgeon, midwife or nurse in either township as far back as Chapman (1880), when the county's medicine lived in the river towns; its modern seats — BellTower Health & Rehabilitation, 5805 N. Fir Road, and The Hearth at Juday Creek, 6330 N. Fir Road — carry no record of a Black practitioner in the open sources. Searched for any Black doctor, nurse or provider at a Granger seat in the Tribune record, provider directories and the open web: nothing returned. The professions-inside-segregation record is the city's hospitals', and no Granger instance exists in the record reached.
Sources: South Bend Reparatory Justice Commission, Final Report, History §IV (Chamblee's account; Huddleston; Durant; Pope); SBAGS obituary, Dr. Samuel Bernard Vagner (posted 25 Sept. 2021); Clio, Dental Office of Dr. Bernard Streets; IUSB CRHC, "South Bend's Own Words" (Huddleston episode, June 2024); banked health fragment.