The NAACP chapter · founded in a church on Birdsell Street

1919 – present

The community's standing army, mustered in 1919: The South Bend branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was founded in 1919 at Mount Zion Baptist Church, 116 North Birdsell Street — the congregation that became Pilgrim Baptist — and met in the community's churches, Olivet among them, through its early years. (A federal tax ruling date of November 1961 attaches to the branch, no. 3067, in Internal Revenue Service records; it is a tax artifact, not a founding, and is not carried as one.) The chapter's documented course runs through nearly every fight in this section. It was the chapter that petitioned the Parks Board over the Natatorium in 1931, and its members — thirteen Black taxpayers, the reporter and politician Jesse Dickinson among them — who carried the fight to the State Tax Board in 1936. Its wartime correspondence survives in the Streets family papers at IU South Bend. In 1966 it stood behind the Linden School parents' suit against rebuilding a segregated school in place, the case that ended in the 1967 settlement. In the consent-decree years it opposed Plan Z in federal court in 2002 and was refused leave to intervene, alongside the Clay group, in the Brookins appeal of 1982 — the court's record of the chapter as a party and would-be party across four decades. In 1999 the branch held its nineteenth annual Hazel B. Hunter luncheon, a fixture named for one of its own. The chapter remains the city's standing civil-rights organization; its two most consequential members, the lawyers of the next entry, were for thirty years its counsel, its strategists and, in J. Chester Allen's 1936 tax-board maneuver, its tacticians of genius.

Sources:

1. Civil Rights Heritage Center, "Pilgrim Baptist Church," Clio (Garner and Dukes) — the chapter's founding in 1919 at Mount Zion Baptist Church, 116 N. Birdsell St.
2. Katherine O'Dell, Our Day (2010), as carried in the Ball State Digital Civil Rights Museum and CRHC records — the 1931 Parks Board petition and the 1936 taxpayers' protest.
3. IU South Bend Archives, Streets Family papers finding aid — the chapter's 1941–42 correspondence (Dorothy King) and the Streets' 1998 Tribune recollections of the founding; federal court records, 511 F. Supp. 1352 and 692 F.2d 623 — the chapter's decree-era litigation posture; South Bend Tribune — the nineteenth annual Hazel B. Hunter luncheon, 1999.