The Natatorium · fourteen years locked out, fourteen years on Mondays

1919 – 2010

"Public" was carved on the building; it was not meant: The land at West Washington and Chapel streets was given by Harry and Maude Engman, the city council voted to build in June 1919, and the Engman Public Natatorium opened on 29 June 1922 — with the word "Public" on its facade and a policy, from its first day, of admitting no Black swimmer at all. For fourteen years the ban was total. The campaign against it was built by the NAACP chapter and the Allens and is documented season by season. In 1931 the chapter petitioned the Parks Board, telling it what exclusion meant in practice: a Black youth had drowned the previous summer in an abandoned gravel pit because this community had "no safe place" to swim.

Nothing moved. In 1936 the city proposed to spend $25,000 repairing the pool — the Tribune reported it closed as unsafe on 30 June — and on 22 September thirteen Black taxpayers, Jesse Dickinson among them, formally protested the appropriation: they were taxed for a public building they were forbidden to enter. The complaint itself carries a caveat the record insists on, and it is printed here at the strength the record gives it: oral history and the community's secondary accounts credit Elizabeth Fletcher Allen with drawing up the original complaint and advising the cause throughout, but her name is absent from the official documents — she was still in law school, and the campaign feared a Black woman's name on the papers would hurt the cause. J. Chester Allen found the lever.

Indiana law routed city appropriations through the State Tax Board, where taxpayers' protests were heard; argued there, the protest reached Tax Commissioner John Rothrock, whose ruling the Tribune headlined on 7 October 1936, "State Orders City to Let Negroes Use Natatorium," and the Pittsburgh Courier celebrated a week later: "Indiana Swimming Pool Color Line Broken." The ruling's terms were the era's compromise — the commissioner refused integrated use and ordered a schedule: Black swimmers admitted on Mondays only. (The segregated schedule's first season is carried variously — the Ball State museum's account begins it in October 1936, the Heritage Center's arithmetic of fourteen years barred and fourteen segregated points to 1937; the ruling's date is certain, the first Monday season is carried as 1936–37 in the record's own range.) Segregated Mondays held through the war.

In February 1950 the Allens returned to the Parks Board with Zilford Carter and Charles Wills of the NAACP and the white attorney Maurice Tulchinsky, and threatened the lawsuit the board could no longer be sure of winning. The board voted that "there is to be no race, creed or color discrimination at the Public Natatorium" and that it be "open to all alike" — private, fee-charging classes alone excepted. Even then the door opened slowly: in about 1957 or 1958, Willie Mae Butts recalled in a 2003 oral history, she was told by a pool teacher that "they haven't given me the okay to enroll any colored kids" in a private class, and Black citizens reported unofficial discrimination at the pool into the 1960s and 1970s. The building outlived the fight by a generation.

The Parks Board voted unanimously on 10 July 1978 to close it — repairs priced at $190,000 and a season's operation at $37,050 against some $2,000 in ticket sales — under its last director, Paul McMinn, and it stood vacant for nearly thirty years. Its second life is the city's own act of memory: the Civil Rights Heritage Center, formed on the IU South Bend campus in 2000, made the building its project in David Healey's "Natatorium Project" of 2005, and on 23 May 2010 the old pool reopened at 1040 West Washington Street as the IU South Bend Civil Rights Heritage Center. Mayor Steve Luecke formally apologized, and the first guest invited through the door was Barbara Brandy, who had been turned away from the pool at the age of nine for coming on the wrong day. The Common Council made the building a local historic landmark in August 2018, unanimously. The scholar of the whole record is Katherine O'Dell, whose Our Day: Race Relations and Public Accommodations in South Bend, Indiana (Wolfson Press, 2010) this entry follows.

Sources:

1. Katherine O'Dell, Our Day: Race Relations and Public Accommodations in South Bend, Indiana (Wolfson Press, 2010) — the building, the ban, the campaigns of 1931–1950 and the closing, as carried in the Civil Rights Heritage Center's records: "Engman Public Natatorium," Clio entry 54549, and Ball State Digital Civil Rights Museum, item 31, including the Tribune citations of 30 June, 22 September and 7 October 1936 and the Pittsburgh Courier of 17 October 1936.
2. IU South Bend Civil Rights Heritage Center, African American Landmark Tour, "Civil Rights Heritage Center," and City of South Bend Historic Preservation Commission, Engman Public Natatorium landmark staff report (July 2018) — the closing settled from the city's own record: the Parks Board's unanimous vote of 10 July 1978, reported the next morning in Edmund Lawler, "'Nat' no more," South Bend Tribune, 11 July 1978; the pool in continuous use "throughout the 1970s."
3. Willie Mae Butts oral history (Civil Rights Heritage Center, 2003) — the private-class refusal of c. 1957–58.
4. City of South Bend, Final Report of the Reparatory Justice Commission (2026), Part V — the pool's 1922 opening, fourteen barred years, the 1936 Monday schedule, the 1950 end of official segregation, the reported discrimination of the 1960s–70s and the 1978 closing.
5. IU South Bend Civil Rights Heritage Center — the Center's founding in 2000, the Natatorium Project of 2005, the reopening of 23 May 2010, Mayor Luecke's apology and Barbara Brandy's place as first guest; the local landmark designation of August 2018.