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3 JUNE 1887 – 1908
The whole telling stands in the culture file; this entry carries the anchor and what this section adds: Medora Powell, eldest child of Elijah and Mary Ann, graduated from Mishawaka High School on 3 June 1887, one of a class of ten, delivering a commencement address titled "Self Made Men" at Burt's Opera House — the Mishawaka Enterprise of 10 June 1887 makes her, on its account, the first African-American graduate of any high school in northern Indiana. Her whole entry — the address's matter, her teaching at the Brownsville School in Cass County, Michigan, her return to Mishawaka to care for family, her death in 1931 — stands in Culture and is not retold here.
What this section adds is the interval: Medora Powell was the only Black graduate of Mishawaka High until her brother Farrow Raymond Powell, class of 1908 — twenty-one years with exactly two named Black graduates, both of one family. The schools file carries her by surname only in its own telling; the first-name record is culture's, standing on the Enterprise and on Bryant. Read with the counts entry below, the interval is the point: through the whole era of the city's industrial rise, its Black presence in its own high school was one family's children.
Sources
- Culture file of this record, article cul-black-mishawaka — Medora Powell whole, on the Mishawaka Enterprise of 10 June 1887 and the Tribune's 2003 retrospective.
- Neighborhoods file of this record, article nbh-black-mishawaka — Farrow Raymond Powell, class of 1908, the only other named Black graduate in twenty-one years.
- Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History — "Medora Powell was the only black graduate of Mishawaka High until her brother Farrow Raymond in 1908."