Normain Heights: the covenant in the deeds

1947 — 2002

The building: Normain Heights was built for the city's returning veterans by one of their own organizations: Veterans' Homes of Mishawaka, Inc., founded by veterans in 1946, which bought farmland on the city's north side — annexed in 1947 — broke ground on 13 November 1947 and dedicated the subdivision in October 1948. It built 315 houses to seven designs, on streets named for the battles the buyers had fought: Ardennes, Palau, Bastogne, Leyte, St. Lo, Guam, Normandy. The state's marker at Main and McKinley, erected in 1997, honors it as an early postwar subdivision.

The paper: The deeds that carried those houses also carried a racially restrictive covenant, barring ownership by non-Caucasians. The South Bend Tribune examined it in 2002, in a piece it titled "Imprint of racism": the language remained written in the deeds a half-century on — unenforced and unenforceable in law, the record ties its unenforceability to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but unrepealed in the text. The examination ran in the same season the neighborhood celebrated its listing on the National Register of Historic Places — residents celebrating "national recognition" in the same paper that printed the covenant. Both stories are 2002; both are the Tribune's; the file prints the pair as the record gives them.

The counterweight: Sixty years before the plat, this city's newspaper had celebrated Medora Powell, Mishawaka High School's class of 1887 — the first African-American high school graduate in northern Indiana, in the schools record's telling. The subdivision built for the city's veterans excluded her descendants by deed text. No campaign to strike the language, and no Mishawaka litigation over it, stands in the record reached; whether any owner has since used a statutory mechanism to remove it is not in the record reached either, and is named as a gap — the settling source is the county recorder's own filings. The covenant's whole course inside the neighborhood's life is the culture record's as well; its paper trail is this section's.

Sources:

1. Indiana Historical Bureau marker 71.1997.1, "Normain Heights Subdivision" (in.gov) — the veterans' corporation, the 315 houses, the seven designs and the battle-named streets.
2. South Bend Tribune, 2002 — "Normain Heights gets national recognition" and "Imprint of racism," as carried in the culture record, Culture.
3. The government record, Government — the 1947 annexation and dedication course; the schools record, Schools & Colleges — Medora Powell.