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1919–1966 · SOUTH BEND (BOUNDARY)
Boundary — the institutions, with their people: the Hering House settlement house, at 726/745 West Western Avenue, was dedicated on 8 March 1925 — the gift of Frank and Claribel Hering — and served the city's Black and immigrant west side for four decades as the community's settlement, the body that intervened in the sewing-class refusal of art-68-4 among a thousand unrecorded interventions. Its founding board's composition prints with its conflict whole, because the sources do not agree: the accounts give the board as two of seven persons of colour, as nine of twelve white, and as five of seven white — three tellings, printed together, unreconciled. Its closing prints the same way: 1963 in one account, 1965 in another. The South Bend branch of the NAACP was founded in 1919 at Mount Zion Baptist Church (founded 1890; 116 North Birdsell Street; reorganised and renamed Pilgrim Baptist in 1935), and Indiana Landmarks records that Olivet A.M.E. hosted early meetings of the branch as well — a chapter born in the churches, as art-68-2's churches were born of exclusion. The lawyer couple's record anchors the article: J. Chester Allen Sr. arrived in 1929, was admitted to the bar in 1930, and built Allen & Allen (established 1939) at 115 South Lafayette Boulevard — the address the Indiana Historical Bureau marked in 2020 (marker 71.2020.2). He sat in the Indiana House in 1939–1941, became the first Black South Bend councilman in 1959 and the first Black member of the school board in 1966. Elizabeth Fletcher Allen, admitted in 1938, was the first Black woman attorney in South Bend and in Indiana. Two conflicts in the Allens' record print whole: J. Chester's law school is Boston University on the Historical Bureau's marker and Boston College in the alumni account; and Wikipedia's claim that Elizabeth Allen held the House seat in 1939–43 stands against the marker's giving the seat to J. Chester for 1939–41 — both tellings printed, the marker's being the state's own. The township's share: the town's Black residents were served by these institutions at county distance or not at all; no settlement house, chapter or Black professional office ever sat on Osceola ground in the record reached.
Sources: South Bend Reparatory Justice Commission, Final Report (2026); Indiana Historical Bureau marker 71.2020.2 (J. Chester and Elizabeth Allen, 2020); AALT entries for Hering House, Mount Zion / Pilgrim Baptist and the Allens; Indiana Landmarks, Olivet A.M.E. account.