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AS OF NOVEMBER 2026
This section's discipline is that a thin record prints thin with its search shown; the consolidated account is this entry: Settled, first-hand: the founding family whole (De Kever, the Enterprise, the family historian); the 1970 count in the census volume's own tables (107 Negro of 35,517); the modern counts whole (2000–2024). Settled negatives, re-searched: no Black congregation seated in Mishawaka in any era; no Mishawaka NAACP branch in the sources reached; no Mishawaka Klan document, and the word absent from the commissioned history entire; no separate school, segregation suit or desegregation decree; no civic first of record. Open, with settling sources named: the decennial counts before 1970 (the 1960 and 1950 census volumes' place tables; NHGIS); the HOLC survey text's reach onto Mishawaka ground (Mapping Inequality's downloads); a Mishawaka open-housing ordinance (the City Council Records 1845–1977 on film, Notre Dame Archives); the Housing Authority's founding date and racial record (the authority and HUD); the Black business roll (the 1967 Directory of Negroes in Business
What the file adds up to is a shape, and the shape is the finding: for a century Mishawaka's Black history is a family's history, lived across a river from every institution the valley's Black community built, in a city whose exclusions were real but documentary — covenants, red lines, silence — rather than litigated; and the community of the present, forty-five times its 1970 size, is young enough that most of its history is still to be made and, for the first time, numerous enough to make it here. The record will be re-run against its named settling sources as they are pulled; nothing in this section is estimated, and nothing in it is borrowed from the city across the river.
Sources
- This section, entries blk-powells through blk-county-frame — the settlements, negatives and gaps consolidated here, each with its own source list.