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1941–1945 AND THE WAR YEARS · SOUTH BEND'S PLANTS (BOUNDARY), WITH THE TOWNSHIP'S OWN LINE
Boundary — the Great Migration reached this county's foundries and assembly plants, and the colour line inside the plants is counted here in incidents, as the row directs: the ceiling was negotiated man by man. At Bendix, the civil-rights attorney J. Chester Allen (art-68-6) persuaded the company, against the pressure of the June 1941 executive order opening defence work, to hire its first six Black workers in 1941 — and by November 1941 the count stood at nineteen Black employees in a workforce of some 7,000: six, then nineteen, is the ceiling measured at the county's most famous plant gate. The training line was drawn the same way: Lucille Sneed and other Black women who presented themselves for a defence sewing class were refused instruction outright — "you're not going to get a job" — until the Hering House settlement (art-68-6) intervened and the refusal was withdrawn. The war plants beyond the city pulled county workers outward on the same terms: Black workers carpooled to the Kingsbury Ordnance Plant in LaPorte County, and the carpool's cost is named in the record in its passengers — Vera Lane, Margaret Morgan and Annette Brodie were injured in the commuting the segregated housing market made necessary. Studebaker stands in the Commission's account as the county's biggest employer of Black workers, which is a comparative, not a compliment: the ceiling existed there too, at a higher floor. Lamanna & Kenny's county series (art-67-5) is the migration's arithmetic — the county's Black population rising from 3,702 in 1940 toward 24,190 by 1990 on the strength of the war and postwar decades. The township's own line: no plant of scale ever stood on Osceola or Penn Township's rural ground — the banked businesses record, tested across a century, seats mills, a creamery and stores, not a foundry — so there is no in-plant colour line to count for the town, because there was no plant. Black arrival on this ground runs through the census line instead: the thirteen of 1870, and a township Black population of 4,675 by 2020, most of it in Mishawaka and the postwar subdivisions. The migration's Osceola chapter is residential, and it is told where it belongs, in art-68-8 and art-68-9.
Sources: South Bend Reparatory Justice Commission, Final Report (2026), employment chapters; Lamanna & Kenny (1996), county series; banked businesses fragment for the township's plant record.