The open-housing fight · William Morris, the realtors' board, and the ordinance of March 1968

1955 – 1973

Thirteen years from an institute of one man to the law of the city: The organized campaign began in 1955, when William R. Morris — Central High School class of 1939, an Army Air Corps veteran, and since 1948 the proprietor of the city's first Black real-estate agency — launched the Institute for Minority Housing. In 1961–62 the South Bend–Mishawaka Citizens for Fair Housing Committee organized the full campaign, printing the geography it opposed: "Most of the 14,000 Negroes live in five areas of South Bend... These are the only areas... in which Negroes can live." On 19 March 1963 the committee's hearings at the Notre Dame Law School put the record under oath. Carol Dillon testified that an agent refused to list her parents' home when they said they would sell "to anyone, Negro or white," because "White families find out if our agency does that sort of thing and it hurts our reputation and our business." Pat Dickinson, a state senator's daughter, told how in 1961 she and her husband — a Korean War veteran wounded in service — were kept three hours in a Riverside Manor sales office and then told the homes "would not be sold to Blacks"; when another turned-away family complained to Washington, the federal Commission on Civil Rights replied on 29 August 1961 that the Veterans Administration's own investigation confirmed the builder's discriminatory policy — and that the V.A. "does not have authority at the present time to take any action against the builder." Bernard Streets, a microbiologist home from the service, testified to the rental refusals ("she couldn't rent it to us because 'her neighbors would tear her hair out'") and to what followed when the white Engendoerfer family hired Morris to sell their Ironwood home and showed it to the Streets: bricks through the windows; a city councilman at the door warning that "we could expect no protection from the police now when this all gets going good"; the Engendoerfers' seven-year-old son dragged into an alley by seven teenagers and beaten into two weeks in a hospital; pressure calls to Mr. Engendoerfer's employer.

The Streets gave up and built in Michigan. Morris fought the profession itself: the South Bend–Mishawaka Board of Realtors denied his membership three times between 1954 and 1964, locking him out of the multiple listings; he sued, and on 10 March 1967 Judge Dempsey ruled the Board had acted improperly — but under Indiana's Anti-Monopoly Act of 1907, for giving no reason, expressly not for racial discrimination. The Board denied his fourth application that September. He never joined it. He built instead: Morris bought east-side land and developed Chalfant Heights, a subdivision where Black families could buy. The city's law moved in steps the record dates exactly: a first, educational non-discrimination ordinance on 14 May 1956 under Mayor Edward F. Voorde created a Fair Employment Practice Commission and addressed no housing; a fair-housing act was introduced 12 November 1963 and defeated again in March 1964, Mayor Lloyd Allen substituting an informal complaints committee under attorney Thomas Signer; Ordinance No. 4820-65, effective 1 January 1966, added penalty power in employment cases and stood up the Human Relations and Fair Employment Practices Commission as a city department — its first director hired April 1966 (George Neagu, who appears in the 1968 entry below), with Dr. Bernard Streets among its chairmen — and launched "Operation Open Neighborhoods." The housing law itself came last: introduced by a Republican councilman in February 1968, carried through an overflow council meeting on 25 March, and passed on 26 March 1968, prohibiting "discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of real estate" — nine days before Dr. King's assassination and sixteen days before the federal Fair Housing Act. Ordinance 5619-73 of 17 December 1973 renamed the commission the South Bend Human Rights Commission, the name it still bears, and gave it subpoena power and reach into education and public accommodations. Morris's career closed the circle the board had tried to bar: in 1969 he became a national director of the NAACP, served until 1977, and went on to the Federal National Mortgage Association as a special advisor on urban affairs and to direct the National Association of Real Estate Brokers. He died in 1999, aged seventy-seven.

Sources:

1. City of South Bend, Final Report of the Reparatory Justice Commission (2026), Parts VI–VIII — the Institute for Minority Housing (1955); the Citizens for Fair Housing Committee and its five-areas statement; the 19 March 1963 Notre Dame Law School hearings and the Dillon, Dickinson and Streets testimonies, with the 29 August 1961 federal reply; the Morris litigation and the 10 March 1967 ruling; Chalfant Heights; the ordinance sequence of 1956, 1963–64, 4820-65 and 26 March 1968; Ordinance 5619-73 (1973); Morris's NAACP directorship and federal service.
2. African American Landmark Tour — George Neagu as the Human Rights Commission's first director; IU South Bend Archives, Streets Family papers finding aid — Dr. Bernard Streets's chairmanship of the Human Relations and Fair Employment Practices Commission.