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1914 – 1929
The factories opened a door — into the hottest room in the plant: Before the First World War, most South Bend factories, stores and service businesses simply did not hire Black workers. War demand changed the door, not the room. During the war years Studebaker, Singer and Westinghouse hired Black laborers; Wilson Brothers, Birdsell Manufacturing, F. P. Box Company and the Oliver Chilled Plow Works followed at points in the 1920s and 1930s. Studebaker, the most willing, at one time employed 700 Black men and women, more than any other local company — and assigned them overwhelmingly to the foundry, in the Commission's words "the hottest, dirtiest, and most dangerous part of the factory," at unequal wages and under unequal conditions; the company's own newspaper photographs from the era show the foundry crews, many of them Black, against an all-white sales force. The census line tells the migration's size: 1,269 Black residents in 1920, the Tribune estimating about 3,000 by 1922, and 3,431 in the census of 1930 (the Population section owns the full series). Housing did not follow work. The newcomers were confined to a handful of districts Gordon mapped in 1922: on the west side, Maggie's Court, off what is now Western Avenue — warehouses converted to tenements and makeshift shacks with no plumbing and no garbage collection, photographed in 1916 — and the Beck's Lake settlement; and an older, more middle-class east-side district of Black homeowners near the A.M.E. Zion church, toward Notre Dame. The division, the Commission notes, was "somewhat class-based," and its geography — Black South Bend pressed west — "persists to this day."
Sources:
- City of South Bend, Final Report of the Reparatory Justice Commission (2026), Part II — the wartime hiring at Studebaker, Singer and Westinghouse; the 1920s–30s followers; the 700 Black Studebaker employees; the foundry assignment and unequal wages; Maggie's Court and its 1916 photographs; Gordon's two districts.
- IU South Bend Civil Rights Heritage Center, African American Landmark Tour, "St. Augustine's Catholic Church" — the 1930 census count of 3,431 Black residents.
- Buford F. Gordon, The Negro in South Bend (1922) — the community's geography as its own historian mapped it.