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1868 – PRESENT
No separate school stands in the record: Indiana's 1869 school law permitted separate schools for Black children, and Hoosier cities across the state built them; South Bend's desegregation course ran from a ceiling's collapse to a federal decree with a life of decades, and it stands whole in South Bend's file. For Mishawaka, no separate colored school, no segregation suit, no desegregation decree, plan or consent order appears in any source reached for this build — and the positive record runs the other way from the start: the Powell children entered the common school on arrival, and the daughter of the first household graduated from its high school in 1887, in the era when the state frame still allowed separation. The state frame is printed at frame size only — the 1869 permission, and the 1949 act that ended legal school segregation in Indiana — because neither is a Mishawaka event; Mishawaka's own timeline is the family's: 1868 arrival, 1887 graduation, 1908 the second.
The long-fight article that the checklist for this section requires where the record carries one cannot be written for Mishawaka, and the absence is printed as the documented finding it is rather than filled from the valley's record: with 107 Black residents in 1970, the city never had the Black school-age population around which a Mishawaka desegregation case forms, and none is documented. The modern corporation's composition and course stand in this record's schools file and current file at their own size. The settling sources for any contrary document are the Mishawaka school board's minutes and the Civil Rights Heritage Center's collection; until they are read, the record stands: integration here was not litigated because, on the counts the census gives, there was almost no one here to litigate it — which is its own fact about the city, and not a small one.
Sources
- Schools file of this record — the corporation's own record whole; the Powell graduation carried there by surname.
- South Bend black-history file — the desegregation course whole. Boundary: South Bend's record, pointer here.
- The state frame: Indiana school law of 1869 (separate schools permitted) and the act of 1949 (legal segregation ended) — frame only, not Mishawaka events.
- This build's searches, all passes — no Mishawaka separate school, suit, decree or plan surfaced.