Hering House · the House of Hope on Western Avenue

1925 – 1963

A settlement house given, pointedly, "for the colored people of South Bend": The antecedent was Black: in 1923 a South Bend man founded the Booker T. Washington Community Service in the basement of his home, and out of that beginning came the city's great Black civic institution. Frank E. Hering — Notre Dame's football coach of 1896–98 and later a professor there — read Gordon's The Negro in South Bend and, with his wife Claribel Hering, resolved to act. The Herings took a former Christian Science church, moved it to 726 West Western Avenue, and deeded it in trust expressly "for the colored people of South Bend." Hering House was dedicated on 8 March 1925, Gordon himself giving the benediction, and was modeled openly on Jane Addams's Hull House: part church, part school, part employment office and part concert hall.

It housed a congregation, Josephine Curtis's H. T. Burleigh Music Association, women's and men's clubs in the line of the Ruffin's and Research clubs, a nursery and gymnasium, and — the service residents' testimony returns to — practical help finding work and training (the sewing-machine fight in the employment entry below began with a visit to Hering House). Its governance carried the era's bargain: the founding documents, as the IU South Bend Archives' finding aid reads them, required only two of seven directors to be persons of color. (Other accounts print the rule differently — the Civil Rights Heritage Center's Clio entry gives a board of twelve with a white majority fixed until 1951, and Belt Magazine five of seven white; the finding aid's reading of the trust terms is carried here and the variants are named rather than reconciled.) Around 1958 Hering House affiliated with the Urban League; the annual reports of 1960 onward run jointly in the names of the South Bend Urban League and Hering House, and the League's reports continue alone after the House closed.

The board voted to disband and Hering House closed in 1963, after thirty-eight years — the History Museum's account rounds its life to forty years and a 1965 closing, a. Lisa Swedarsky's A Place with Purpose: Hering House 1925–1963 (Wolfson Press, 2009) is its history; its records are at the IU South Bend Archives.

Sources:

1. IU South Bend Archives, Hering House records finding aid (Civil Rights Heritage Center Collections, CRHC.HERING) — the Booker T. Washington Community Service of 1923; the trust terms requiring two of seven directors to be persons of color; the Urban League affiliation of c. 1958 and the joint reports; the board's vote to disband and the 1963 closing.
2. The History Museum, South Bend — the Herings' gift, Frank Hering's Notre Dame years, the moved Christian Science church building, and the dedication of 8 March 1925; the museum's "closed in 1965" and "active for 40 years" are its own rounding, noted in the text.
3. Civil Rights Heritage Center, "Hering House," Clio — the Hull House model, the resident church, clubs and employment help, and its variant board account (nine of twelve white until 1951).
4. Lisa Swedarsky, A Place with Purpose: Hering House 1925–1963 (Wolfson Press, 2009).