Black doctors and nurses · practice inside segregated hospitals

1949 – 1960s

Six physicians, counted by the sixth: Dr. Roland Chamblee, who landed on the Normandy beaches as a medic and arrived in South Bend in 1953, enumerated the city's Black physicians from his own knowledge: William Smith was one of the first, then Dr. Mott second, Milton Butts third, Bernard Vagner fourth, Lawrence Bell fifth, "and he was the sixth" — with Dr. Hickman and Dr. Fears remembered among the early years' doctors besides. Dr. Bernard Vagner, the city's first Black surgeon, opened his Washington Street practice in 1949 in offices shared with Dr. Mott and Dr. Foreman; a surgeon needs referrals, and his came from his own family practice — "all the surgery I got came from my practice." St. Joseph Hospital put him on its surgical staff; Memorial Hospital admitted him to its medical staff but not its surgical staff.

Both hospitals were still segregated when Chamblee arrived in 1953: St. Joseph desegregated its patients first, Memorial about two years later, and it was five years more before Memorial had a Black intern; St. Joseph's one Black intern was Lawrence Bell. Black nurses broke the same wall at ward level — Charlotte Huddleston, one of the city's first licensed practical nurses, worked at Memorial under patients who used the slur to her face; Bobbie Durant was rejected by both hospitals' nursing programs before her degree forced the door, a Memorial director explaining he "didn't know how it would be to work at a hospital with black nurses"; Helen Pope stayed deliberately, "getting her foot in the door for other Blacks." The doctors' private lives ran the housing gauntlet the open-housing entry documents in full: steering at every turn for Vagner, who bought his office lot through a white intermediary at a $1,000 markup and financed in Chicago because no local institution would lend to him; and for Chamblee, the Ironwood house that Notre Dame law professor Conrad Kellenberg bought and resold to him for a dollar after the seller's agent discovered his race — followed, in Chamblee's own testimony, by the night in his first month when someone shot the house up, eight shells found twenty feet away, through the children's bedroom, the dining room, the bathroom and his own. "Never did find out who did it." Both men were pillars of the community's other institutions — Chamblee, with Neagu, organized the march of April 1968 — and their oral histories, taken by the Civil Rights Heritage Center, are the Story of South Bend section of this entry.

Sources:

1. City of South Bend, Final Report of the Reparatory Justice Commission (2026), Part IV — Chamblee's enumeration of the Black physicians; Vagner's practice, staff privileges and housing and office purchases; the hospitals' desegregation sequence and first Black interns; Huddleston, Durant and Pope; the Kellenberg purchase and the shooting of Chamblee's house, in the doctors' own CRHC oral-history testimony.