Linden School and the long desegregation · from a ceiling's collapse to a federal decree

1890 – 1981

A school built for white children became the city's Black school — by geography the district arranged: Indiana law gave Black children no guarantee of schooling before 1869 and required separate schools where numbers sufficed thereafter; South Bend's numbers stayed small enough that its Black children long attended predominantly white schools — an experience an anonymous Black writer anatomized in the Tribune of July 1921: "Colored children who attend white schools have but few moments, if any, in which they are not made to feel the white man's prejudices." Linden School opened 1 September 1890 at Linden and Adams, built as a duplicate of Franklin School for the west side's growing white population, two stories, four classrooms, 186 students. As Black families were confined to the surrounding streets, the school changed color around its own address: Bernard Streets Jr., who attended from 1938 to 1948, remembered it running from about 85–90 percent white to the reverse across his own school years, and by the end of the 1940s 82 percent of Linden's 369 students were Black.

The landmark tour's finding is the entry's hinge: in all its research it found no indication that the school corporation ever explicitly set Linden aside for Black children — the segregation was accomplished by housing geography and an unwritten neighborhood-school policy, with attendance boundaries, in the Commission's finding, "adjusted" over the years "to hold down the spread of Negro enrollment," in J. Chester Allen's words of 1965. The district's own quoted position on hiring was the era's formula — "We will hire no teacher simply on the basis that he is either white or colored" — and until 1950 it hired none who were Black. The first, for the 1950 school year, were Peggy Flowers Eskridge and Herbert Lewis Jr., both Riley High School graduates, both assigned to Linden; Ruby Jarrot Joyce followed as the first Black professional staff member, in the department of pupil personnel; by 1955 six Black teachers worked for the corporation, all at Linden; and in 1959 Edward Myers — who had begun teaching at Linden in 1953 — became the city's first Black principal, at Linden.

Inside the majority-Black schools the record of inequality is testimonial and specific: textbooks ten to twenty years old while Perley got new ones (George McCullough, later principal of Riley and Washington, remembered opening them), Linden receiving no new textbooks at all in the late 1960s unless its principal fetched them from another school (Howard Edwards, the corporation's former Director of School Learning, confirmed it to the Commission), counselors telling Black students they were "not college material" (McCullough; Lucille Sneed), and Superintendent Alex Jardine stating publicly in 1965 that busing to integrate was no solution because "mixing children of different backgrounds reduces the achievement of all of them." By 1965–66 Linden's student body was about 99 percent Black, in one of the district's oldest and most dilapidated buildings. At Christmas 1966 a basement classroom's ceiling collapsed seconds after its teacher got her third-graders out.

The NAACP had already sued that year, charging that the district's plan to rebuild Linden in place was motivated by maintaining segregation; the parents sued over the "inferior and increasingly dangerous" facilities; and the 1967 settlement committed the district to close Linden and devise an integration plan. Linden closed and was demolished in November 1972, its replacement, Kennedy School, opening the same year on ground now marked by the Dr. Martin Luther King Dream Center. It was not enough. Federal pressure had been building since the D.C. district court's 20 July 1976 order in Brown v. Weinberger forced HEW to enforce the law; in February 1980 the United States sued the South Bend Community School Corporation under Title IV and the Equal Educational Opportunities Act, alleging intentional segregation of students and faculty.

The parties agreed a consent decree on 8 February 1980; Judge Allen Sharp approved the amended decree and plan on 17 April 1981 (United States v. South Bend Community School Corp., 511 F. Supp. 1352), under which each school's Black enrollment was to fall within fifteen percentage points of the district's for the 1981–82 year, transportation and closing burdens were to fall equitably, and faculty assignments from 1980–81 were to mirror the district's composition. Black parents were on both sides of the plan in court: the Brookins class, represented pro bono by attorney David W. Albert, sued on 8 September 1981 to challenge it, and the Seventh Circuit in 1982 affirmed the decree (692 F.2d 623) while refusing the Brookins plaintiffs, the Clay group and the NAACP branch leave to intervene. The decree's hardest local echo came in Britton v. SBCSC, 819 F.2d 766 (7th Cir. 1987), over the 1982 layoffs of 146 teachers — all white, 48 of them senior to Black teachers retained under the contract's race-conscious layoff provision.

Sources:

1. IU South Bend Civil Rights Heritage Center, African American Landmark Tour, "Linden School" — the 1890 opening and building; the enrollment arc and Streets's account; the absence of any explicit set-aside policy; the 1966 ceiling collapse and suit; the 1967 settlement; the first teachers of 1950 (Eskridge and Lewis), Ruby Jarrot Joyce, the six teachers of 1955, and Myers's 1959 principalship; the board's quoted hiring formula.
2. City of South Bend, Final Report of the Reparatory Justice Commission (2026), Part III.C — the boundary adjustments; the textbook and counselor testimony (McCullough, Edwards, Sneed, Paige, Nur); Jardine's 1965 statement; Allen's 1965 editorial; the 99-percent figure of 1965–66; the consent decree's signing and 17 April 1981 approval and terms; the 1970 counts (seven schools over 50 percent Black; Linden 97.3 percent).
3. United States v. South Bend Community School Corp., 511 F. Supp. 1352 (N.D. Ind. 1981), aff'd, 692 F.2d 623 (7th Cir. 1982); Britton v. South Bend Community School Corp., 819 F.2d 766 (7th Cir. 1987) — the decree, the Brookins litigation and intervention rulings, and the layoff case.