The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1967–2026 · SOUTH BEND AT BOUNDARY SIZE; GRANGER'S SHARE AND THE PRESENT RECORD STATED
Racial unrest struck South Bend's west side 25–28 July 1967. On 26 July, outside the LaSalle Neighborhood Center at 2910 W. Western Avenue, Melvin Phillips — a young Black man, a local high school sports star — was shot by a police shotgun blast to the groin and upper right thigh after a meeting with Mayor Lloyd M. Allen: police ordered those leaving the centre to return inside; Phillips had permission to leave, crossed the street, was restrained, broke away, ran, was pursued by a police dog, fell, and was shot, in the Notre Dame Observer's account of 11 December 1967 — "almost killed him"; before that night he walked alone, and after it he could not. Two people were shot or hurt that night (Gail Brodie's oral history, 27 November 2007, remembers her mother Annette Brodie opening the centre and pushing people into a back room behind file cabinets); cars were overturned and burned and store windows smashed. The Commission adds the sequel: it was Phillips's shooting that finally prompted action in the Beck's Lake neighbourhood — the dump became a park and the Charles Black Recreation Center opened in 1968. After Dr. King's assassination on 4 April 1968, Dr. Roland Chamblee and George Neagu, the white first director of the city's Human Rights Commission, went to Mayor Allen's house that evening and pressed him until he agreed to a statement for the city. The march they organised began early the next morning, 5 April 1968, from five separate starting points across the city's racial and faith communities — Sinai Synagogue at Eddy and LaSalle among them, and the former St. Paul's Bethel Baptist Church across from St. Augustine's on West Washington — gathered at 9:30 a.m., and converged in silence on the St. Joseph County Courthouse at Washington and Main, where the Rev. Charles Rowlett of Pilgrim Baptist and Charles Wills of the NAACP spoke. The count is the Tribune's own headline: Roger Birdsell, "4,000 March to Courthouse," The South Bend Tribune, 5 April 1968, page 1. The spring ran on: a sit-in at the School Board of Education on 29 April 1968 ended with 50 to 100 arrested, the Rev. Joe Schneiders and Fr. Daniel Peil among them, and in August 1968 the First Unitarian Church was bombed and burned.
The firsts in public life print in a row. Legislature: J. Chester Allen, first African American from the South Bend area elected to the Indiana House (1938; served 1939–1941); Jesse L. Dickinson, six terms in the House (1943–1957) and two in the Senate (1959, 1961), executive director of the South Bend Housing Authority 1958–1972, chairman of the Indiana Civil Rights Commission. Council: Allen again, the city's first Black councilman, elected 1959; Charlotte D. Pfeifer-Gillam, Common Council 1995–2007 and its first Black president, three terms, also the area's first Black female adult probation officer. Uniform: Lafayette "Dusty" Riddle, among the earliest Black officers of the South Bend Police Department from about the 1930s (James Bowen and Albert E. Pope also early, little recorded); Darryl Boykins, the department's first Black Chief of Police, 2007 (joined 1984, retired 2017, died 13 December 2024); Jack Reed, the Fire Department's first Black battalion chief (joined 1960), who had been turned down by the Indiana State Police — "we are not ready for a colored state policeman" — before a court order forced state-police hiring. Classroom: the first Black teachers of 1950 and principal Edward Myers of 1959 (art-68-11, with the naming conflict printed whole there); Alma Nesbitt Powell, the first Black woman to serve as a principal in the South Bend schools, at Studebaker School; J. Chester Allen, first Black school board member, 1966. County: Andrew Huggart, "first colored man to run for office" in St. Joseph County, by his 1881 obituary. Granger's own firsts are a named gap: no first Black officeholder, township official, or PHM teacher from this ground was found in any open source; settler: St. Joseph County election records and PHM personnel records. The Black press prints with this city's own papers named — The South Bend Forum (1923, weekly), the South Bend Journal (1928, weekly, ed. William D. LaMarr), the Observer (1913), the South Bend Herald-Times (1950s), and The Reformer (1967–1971), which served the Black community and ran a "Free Legal Help" column pointing readers to the Allens' firm — and the papers that were not this city's excluded by name, as the row directs: the Indianapolis Recorder (Indianapolis; it covered Michiana, including the 1935 Owens shooting and a 1960 profile of Allen, but it is Indianapolis's paper), the Chicago Defender (Chicago), the Gary Crusader (Gary), the Fort Wayne Ink Spot (Fort Wayne) and Our Times (Evansville).
Urban renewal's displacement is counted in families, and the count prints whole with its internal difference explained, not smoothed. The Commission: "By the late 1960s, an estimated 606 South Bend families had been displaced by urban renewal projects in South Bend," nearly three-quarters of them families of colour. Its own table, however, lists Chapin Street 116, LaSalle Park 335 and Sample Street 335 — 786 relocations, not 606; Vice Chair Judith Fox explained to the Tribune (5 October 2026) that the table counts each move, and many families were moved more than once across the three projects — Dorothy Smith's family (art-68-8) was displaced three times over. The 606 is the estimated count of unique families; 786 is the project-by-project relocation count; and neither includes the Linden School redevelopment or the six downtown urban development grants, for which the federal government had stopped requiring displacement numbers. The environmental tail is Beck's Lake itself: the LaSalle Park neighbourhood's lake, filled with industrial waste and refuse through the early and mid-1900s — Bendix's dumping disclosed to the EPA in 1989 included hexavalent chromium and a recognised carcinogen among the solvents — added to the federal Superfund National Priorities List in December 2013, its soils carrying lead and arsenic, cleaned in part in 2022 (the top two feet of soil removed and replaced), still not delisted as of November 2026, the surrounding census tracts holding the lowest life expectancy in St. Joseph County. The closing accounting is the reparatory body's present record, dated: the Reparatory Justice Commission, empanelled 28 September 2023, filed its final report with the City Clerk on 4 May 2026 (the report is dated 5 March 2026); the Common Council finalised it 26 May 2026 and received it 8 June 2026; Mayor James Mueller formally apologised on 9 June 2026; the Council passed two apology resolutions on 22 June 2026, the second committing the report to a permanent public record and website with the St. Joseph County Public Library and the IUSB Civil Rights Heritage Center; the report was publicly presented at the library's Main Branch on 29 June 2026. Of its 62 recommendations, as of 5 November 2026 the Tribune counted 32 in place or underway — 32 of the 38 under the city's control — with the policing subcommittee's work unfinished and a supplementary report pending, and the Mayor committed to an updated written report to Council by 5 November 2027; Black Lives Matter South Bend rejects the premise of progress. Granger's share of the whole row is stated once: none of the unrest, none of the displacement, and none of the renewal happened on this ground — the neighbourhoods fragment's plat record shows no urban-renewal clearance in the townships — and this article is this section's finding on that point, printed, not implied.
Sources: AALT (IUSB), St. Joseph County Courthouses page (incl. endnote citing Birdsell, Tribune, 5 Apr. 1968); Notre Dame Observer (11 Dec. 1967) via CRHC oral histories; South Bend Reparatory Justice Commission, Final Report, History §§V.D, VII (Phillips; 606 table); South Bend Tribune (28 July 2002; 5 Oct. 2026; 6 Nov. 2026); Indiana Historical Society, Jesse L. Dickinson collection (M 532); Jack Reed oral history, IUSB CRHC (1 Aug. 2001); Wikipedia, "List of African American newspapers in Indiana" (South Bend titles and LCCN); U.S. EPA, Beck's Lake site profile (cumulis.epa.gov, ID 0501954) and news release (18 Dec. 2013).