Better Homes of South Bend · twenty-two couples buy a street in secret

1950 – present

The answer to the redlined map, built by the men the map was drawn against: On 21 May 1950 a group of Black Studebaker workers and their wives incorporated Better Homes of South Bend — and kept it secret on purpose. Its first minutes record the rule: "no information is to be given out," because the founders knew what publicity would bring down on a Black building cooperative in 1950. Its officers were Lureatha Allen, president; Earl Thompson, vice president; Louise Taylor, secretary; Ruby Paige, assistant secretary; and Bland Jackson, treasurer. Most of its twenty-two couples were Great Migration arrivals of the 1940s living in prefabricated housing on Prairie Avenue near the plant — housing a c. 1952 fact sheet flatly called a "slum" — in a decade when, as Emma Lou Thornbrough documented for the state, Black families were crowded into substandard one- and two-room units.

Studebaker was the city's biggest Black employer; its wages were the co-op's capital. The group's lawyer, J. Chester Allen, worked through the white attorney George Sands to secure the land — twenty-six lots in Gabrielle Robinson's history of the project; the Reparatory Justice Commission's report says eighteen, and both figures stand in the record — in the 1700 and 1800 blocks of North Elmer Street, until then an all-white street. Building was its own fight: the city's biggest builder was Colpaert, whose houses for Black buyers were known in the community as plaster-board boxes, and Place and Co. was known to frame white houses with two-by-fours and Black houses with one-by-fours. Better Homes persevered, and by the mid-1950s twenty-two homes stood on North Elmer. The first family in was Bland and Rosa Jackson, in the fall of 1952 — in the treasurer's own house, on the street his cooperative had opened.

The project is cited in Jessica Gordon Nembhard's Collective Courage (2014) among Indiana's first successful Black building cooperatives. The State of Indiana marked the street in 2017 with historical marker 71.2017.2, at North Elmer and Keller, on the site of the one original home since demolished, Leroy Cobb's. Robinson's Better Homes of South Bend: An American Story of Courage (The History Press, 2015) tells the whole story and has been adapted for the stage; the Jacksons' street is still there.

Sources:

1. Indiana Historical Bureau, marker 71.2017.2 (installed 2017) and the Indiana History Blog's Better Homes series — the 21 May 1950 formation, the officers, the secrecy rule, the twenty-six lots secured through George Sands, the Jacksons' first occupancy in fall 1952, the marker and its site.
2. Gabrielle Robinson, Better Homes of South Bend: An American Story of Courage (The History Press, 2015) — the twenty-two couples, the Prairie Avenue prefabs, and the fullest narrative of the project.
3. City of South Bend, Final Report of the Reparatory Justice Commission (2026), Part VI — the co-op in the Commission's telling (eighteen lots; twenty-two homes on North Elmer), with the Colpaert and Place and Co. construction record; the lot-count difference between the two accounts is carried in the text.