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1967 – 1968
The summer the Lake's grievances came due in one night: The LaSalle Park neighborhood — "the Lake" — entered the summer of 1967 with a drained lake turned city dump still burning beside it, unpaved streets, and a renewal plan that had already taken homes. With Detroit and Newark in flames that July, Mayor Lloyd Allen and council members met Black citizens at the LaSalle Park neighborhood center to head off trouble. On the night of 26 July 1967 trouble came anyway. Youths were ordered back inside the center and effectively trapped there; one threw a chair through a window to get out; police, the landmark tour's account states, mistook the shattering for a gunshot, and two officers emptied their shotguns into the broken window, injuring six Black youths, after which Captain Stachowicz fired a submachine gun into the ceiling "to restore order." No gun was found on anyone.
Outside, officers arrested Melvin Phillips, twenty-one, who had come from his evening's work to get his younger brother Thomas out of the building. Handcuffed and disoriented, Phillips broke away; Sergeant Roy Jensen ordered "stop that man"; Officer Jerome Szweda loosed a police dog; and Officer Ronald St. Germain fired a shotgun at close range, the blast taking Phillips in the groin and upper right thigh — a photograph circulated to the newspapers showed him with a police shotgun around his neck. Specialists in Indianapolis saved his life; his leg was amputated. His family's compensation through five months of incapacity was $11.75 a week for food, against medical bills over $2,000; Notre Dame's Blue Circle and Professor Phillip Rathburn organized the Melvin Phillips Fund and a Christmas door-to-door drive across the campus to carry them.
Mayor Allen imposed a curfew at 10:07 that night and asked the governor for 300 National Guard troops, with 700 more on standby; the curfew held and was lifted Thursday. George Neagu, the Human Rights Commission's first director, remembered the era's two Julys in one sentence: in 1968 the city mobilized to prevent "the turmoil that had plagued South Bend just as it had in July 1967." Lynn Coleman, who grew up at the Lake, credited the shooting with finally forcing the city's hand on the park: the dump became LaSalle Park, and the Charles Black Recreation Center opened in November 1968 (named, later, for Charles Black Sr.). Nine months after the shooting, and nine days after the city's fair-housing ordinance passed, Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis. On 5 April 1968 Dr. Roland Chamblee and George Neagu organized a memorial march: some 4,000 people walked from five starting points across the city to the St. Joseph County Courthouse, where, after Mayor Allen at first refused to come downstairs, Charles Wills of the NAACP and the Rev. Charles Rowlett of Pilgrim Baptist addressed the crowd. The Tribune's headline the next morning was the count itself: "4,000 March to Courthouse."
Sources:
- IU South Bend Civil Rights Heritage Center, African American Landmark Tour, "The Lake" — the 26 July 1967 night at the center: the chair through the window, the shotguns and the six injured youths, the Stachowicz volley, the Phillips arrest and shooting with the officers named, the 10:07 p.m. curfew and the National Guard request; the recreation center's approval ($225,000, November 1967) and November 1968 opening.
- The Observer (University of Notre Dame), 11 December 1967, and Notre Dame Scholastic, 15 December 1967 — Phillips's wounding, amputation, bills and $11.75 a week; the Phillips Fund and the Rathburn-organized campus drive; Mayor Allen's meeting at the center.
- City of South Bend, Final Report of the Reparatory Justice Commission (2026), Part V.D — Lynn Coleman's account crediting the Phillips shooting with prompting the park's creation; African American Landmark Tour, introduction — Neagu's "July 1967" sentence and the 5 April 1968 march, its organizers, route and speakers, with the Tribune's Roger Birdsell, "4,000 March to Courthouse," 5 April 1968.