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Across four tension-filled days, July 25–28, 1967, disturbance ran on South Bend's west side: a car overturned and burned, store windows smashed, in the Tribune's own retrospective file captions. The night of July 26 turned on the LaSalle Park Neighborhood Center, where a meeting with Mayor Lloyd Allen and city council members had been called to discuss ways of alleviating the city's racial tensions. As the meeting broke up, police ordered the crowd to disperse; a young South Bend man, Melvin Phillips, who had been given permission to return to the centre, crossed the street to re-enter it, was seized by officers, broke away and ran, and was brought down by a police dog and a shotgun blast that wounded him in the groin and upper right thigh and nearly killed him — an account carried whole in the Notre Dame Observer of December 11, 1967, built around Phillips' own case, and corroborated in outline by the Tribune's later Civil Rights Perspective retrospectives, which print the injured youth helped outside the LaSalle Center that night. The unrest's 1968 sequel in the county record is of a different form — a sit-in at the South Bend school administration building on April 29, 1968, with ministers among those arrested and jailed overnight, in the oral-history record of a participant. Two disciplines are printed with the telling. First, scope: this article rests on the press and oral-history record only, as the cluster's crime/unrest scope requires, and a curfew — the third element of the checklist's pattern — is not in any source reached for those nights and is not claimed. Second, ground: no unrest night, of 1967, 1968 or any year, is recorded on Osceola or Penn Township ground in any source reached; the town's absence from the county's unrest record is total, and is printed as its share.
Sources: The Observer (Notre Dame), December 11, 1967 — the Melvin Phillips account, July 26, 1967. South Bend Tribune, Civil Rights Perspective retrospective, 2002 (the July 25–28, 1967 file photographs and captions: the burned car, the smashed windows, the injured youth at the LaSalle Center). Dale Gibson oral history, March 17, 2003, IUSB Civil Rights Heritage Center (the April 29, 1968 school-board sit-in and arrests). This build's Crime & Public Safety — no unrest record on this ground.