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1870–1928 · SOUTH BEND (BOUNDARY), WITH THE TOWN'S OWN LINE
Exclusion is the founding fact of this county's Black church record, and it is stated as the founding fact, not softened. Danisha Marable's Purdue dissertation on the county's Black churches (Christianity for Negroes) establishes the premise from the community's own memory: Black arrivals in South Bend were refused religious solace in most, if not all, of the city's white churches. The first Black churches rose from that refusal. Boundary — the mother church: Olivet African Methodist Episcopal Church was organised in 1870 by the Reverend J. Bundy with nine charter members — among them Mr. and Mrs. Farrow Powell, of the family whose settlement stands in art-68-1 — and became a legal entity by Articles of Association on 16 March 1871, as the "Olivet Chapel Society of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Bend." Its first sanctuary stood at 310 West Monroe Street; the congregation replaced it on the same site with the sanctuary dedicated 4 February 1917, worshipped there until urban renewal took the ground, and moved in 1969 to 719 North Notre Dame Avenue, the former Lowell Heights Methodist church (built 1923, architect Frank G. Dillard) — the building listed on the National Register on 6 March 2023 as the Lowell Heights–Olivet A.M.E. Church. The City of South Bend's own proclamation 11-2017 names what Olivet was: the first African-American church in South Bend, "the mother church," 310 West Monroe "the cradle, of Pilgrim Baptist, First A.M.E. Zion, and other congregations." Boundary — the parish: St. Augustine Catholic Church was founded in 1928 for the same reason in Catholic form: Black Catholic families who had come from Pascagoula, Mississippi, from 1916 onward found the city's Catholic churches unwelcoming, and Father George O'Connor, a Holy Cross priest, gathered seven families and built them a parish — decreed by the diocese in 1928, its church at 1501 West Washington Street dedicated by Archbishop Noll on 15 June 1941, and described by the diocese today as the only historically Black parish in the diocese, "initially founded in 1928 to serve Black folk." (Marable's abstract groups St. Augustine's among the first churches "since 1871" alongside Olivet, Pilgrim Missionary Baptist and Laymen Chapel C.M.E.; the parish's own record dates its founding to 1928, and the grouping is printed as a grouping across eras, not as a founding date.) The town's own line closes the article: Osceola's religion record — the banked religion fragment's full congregation roll — contains no Black congregation, no mission and no exclusion founding; the town's Black residents in the record worshipped, if the record is any guide, where the county's Black churches were, in Mishawaka's and South Bend's pews or not at all, and no Osceola congregation's door is recorded as either opened or closed to them.
Sources: Olivet A.M.E. Church history (Lola Stewart Mathews; Articles of Association, 16 March 1871); City of South Bend Proclamation 11-2017; Indiana Landmarks, Olivet A.M.E. Church accounts (2022); Marable, Christianity for Negroes (Purdue dissertation, abstract and record); Today's Catholic (Diocese of Fort Wayne–South Bend), St. Augustine parish spotlight, 2024; National Register listing, Lowell Heights–Olivet A.M.E. Church (2023); banked religion fragment.