Black Mishawaka: Medora Powell, and the record of a small community

1887 TO THE PRESENT · DOCUMENTED IN PERSONS AND IN EXCLUSIONS

The first name in Black Mishawaka's record is a graduate's. On June 3, 1887, Medora Powell — eldest child of Elijah and Mary Ann Powell — graduated from Mishawaka High School, one of a class of ten, the school's first Black graduate and, the Mishawaka Enterprise reported, possibly the first Black student to graduate from any high school in northern Indiana. The Enterprise's account of the commencement, held at the opera house on what is now Lincoln Way, survives in quotation: "Great interest centered in the appearance of this promising young pupil, not only from the fact that she is the first colored scholar ever graduated in northern Indiana, but because of her high standing as a pupil." Her own commencement address was on the topic of "Self Made Men," arguing that the self-educated are not narrow-minded. She never married; she taught for a time at the Brownsville School in Cass County, Michigan — the record suggests Michigan's easier licensing and that county's sizable Black population drew her — returned to Mishawaka to care for family, and died in 1931. Her brother Farrow Raymond Powell followed her through the same school in 1908, and between the siblings the record names no other Black graduate of Mishawaka High in those twenty-one years. A 2003 Tribune retrospective, drawing on Powell family historian John Charles Bryant, gathered her story for a modern audience, and the city's commissioned history carries her as "a role model for racial integration and commitment to education for all Mishawakans."

The other side of the record must stand beside hers, at its documented strength. Mishawaka's Black population remained small through the factory age — the community never built, in any source reached for this section, the parallel institutions the valley's Black South Bend built across the river: no Black congregation, society or business district in Mishawaka is carried by the record reached, and that absence is printed as the finding it is, with its settling sources named below. Exclusion, where it operated, left paper: the Tribune's 2002 examination of Normain Heights, the Mishawaka subdivision built for Second World War veterans and later listed on the National Register of Historic Places, found the racially restrictive covenant — barring ownership by non-Caucasians — still written in the neighborhood's deeds, unenforced and unenforceable since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 but unrepealed in the text. The neighborhood's whole course belongs to this history's controversies and neighborhoods records; it is carried here at the size culture requires, as the documentary counterweight to the Powell story: the same city that celebrated its first Black graduate in its newspaper in 1887 was, sixty years later, platting a veterans' subdivision whose deeds excluded her descendants. Both facts are Mishawaka's, and this section prints both. The settling sources for the community's fuller record are the IUSB Civil Rights Heritage Center's oral-history collections — gathered for the valley, with their Mishawaka side unworked in the record reached — the census enumeration schedules, and the city's own Black church and family records wherever they survive.

Sources:

1. Mishawaka Enterprise, June 10, 1887 — the commencement account and the quotation, as preserved in the sources below.
2. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History — Medora Powell's graduation, address, teaching, and death; Farrow Raymond Powell, 1908.
3. South Bend Tribune (2003), "Memorable first; African-American Powell pioneering graduate of MHS" — the retrospective and the Bryant family history.
4. South Bend Tribune (2002), "Imprint of racism" — the Normain Heights covenant in the deeds, as found.