Firsts in public life · the legislature, the council chamber, the uniform, the classroom

1939 – 1972

Each one verified, none inflated: South Bend sent two Black legislators to Indianapolis in the same generation. Jesse L. Dickinson — born in Oklahoma in 1906, a tenor who came to the city with the Redpath Chautauqua in 1927 and settled in 1928, and who appears in this section first as a taxpayer-petitioner at the Natatorium in 1936 — was elected to the Indiana House in 1943 and served six terms (1943, 1945, 1951, 1953, 1955, 1957), then two terms in the Indiana Senate (1959, 1961), working, in the Commission's summary, "tirelessly" for civil-rights and housing law; Governor Welsh gave him the Sagamore of the Wabash. From 1958 to 1972 he was executive director of the South Bend Housing Authority — administering the very housing machinery this section documents.

J. Chester Allen's House service (1939–43) and his later standing as the council's first Black member (1960–63) and the county bar's first Black president (1969–70) are told in the Allens entry; Elizabeth Fletcher Allen's firsts — the state's first Black woman lawyer (1938), the city's first woman on its bench as judge pro tem, and its first Black woman Superior Court judge pro tem — stand there too. In uniform the record is precise about its own limits. Jerome Perkins is documented by the Heritage Center as "one of the first" African Americans to serve as a South Bend police officer, 1952 to 1972 — the record's phrase, carried exactly. Elmer Joseph's testimony preserves the terms of that service: the Black officers "all worked in that area because Black officers could not arrest Whites." The Fire Department's own Black History Month tribute fixes William H. Wilson Jr.: hired 22 February 1951 as the department's first Black firefighter; lieutenant in 1956; Battalion Chief in 1972, "the first African American administrative officer in the department's history"; head of the Inspection Bureau; retired 1975 after twenty-four years; died 1987, aged fifty-eight. Jack Reed — who had wanted to be a policeman and been told by both the State Police and the city force that they were not ready for a Black officer — joined the Fire Department instead, rose to battalion chief, and went on to serve as a mayoral staffer and deputy mayor under Mayors Joe Kernan and Steve Luecke.

The Commission's report calls Reed "the first Black Battalion Chief in South Bend"; the department's own tribute gives Wilson's 1972 promotion the department's first. Both attributions stand in the record and are printed here together rather than resolved: Wilson's is the department's documented chronology, Reed's the Commission's word, and Reed's battalion-chief service and deputy-mayor service are not in doubt. The classroom firsts are in the schools entry: Eskridge and Lewis (teachers, 1950), Ruby Jarrot Joyce (professional staff), Edward Myers (principal, 1959, and the corporation's first Black coach). To them add Alma Nesbitt Powell — Washington High class of 1961, a teacher who was herself turned away from a student-teaching placement when the receiving teacher "decided not to have a student teacher this year," assistant principal at Central Middle School in the later 1960s, a leader of the corporation's desegregation work, and the first Black woman to serve as principal of a South Bend school, at Studebaker School, before directing curriculum for Elkhart's schools; George McCullough, a Harrison and Washington student of the old textbooks, who became principal of Riley and Washington high schools; and, in the professions, Dr. Bernard Vagner, the city's first Black surgeon (1949), William R. Morris, its first Black realtor (1948), Lucille Thomas, the county's first Black sales representative (1957), and Adam Arnold Jr., offered in 1957 the post of first Black professor in Notre Dame's business school — whose own housing ordeal, properties withdrawn and a bank's $15,000 lending ceiling west of Twyckenham Drive, is carried in the Commission's pages as the measure of what a "first" still cost.

Sources:

1. Indiana Historical Society, Jesse L. Dickinson Collection finding aid — the House terms (1943–1957) and Senate terms (1959, 1961), the Housing Authority directorship 1958–1972, and the organizational record; City of South Bend, Final Report of the Reparatory Justice Commission (2026), Parts V–VI — the Sagamore of the Wabash, the Perkins-era testimony of Elmer Joseph, the Reed account (with its "first Black Battalion Chief" attribution), Alma Powell's and George McCullough's careers, and the Adam Arnold appointment and housing record.
2. South Bend Fire Department, Black History Month tribute (February 2026) — William H. Wilson Jr.'s hire, promotions and standing as the department's first Black administrative officer.
3. Civil Rights Heritage Center oral-history program — Jerome Perkins, "one of the first African Americans to serve as a police officer in South Bend, serving from 1952 to 1972."