Redlining in writing · covenants, the HOLC survey, and A. C. Colpaert

1922 – 1968

The exclusion was not a custom; it was paperwork, approved by the city: The Reparatory Justice Commission's housing subcommittee searched the county's plats and counted sixty-eight housing developments created between 1922 and 1953 carrying racially restrictive covenants — most inside the city, and every city plat among them approved by the South Bend Board of Public Works. The language was boilerplate: the 1923 Jefferson Park Addition plat is the report's example. The practice did not stop when the Supreme Court held such covenants unenforceable in 1948 — twelve more plats with racial covenants were approved in the county and its cities after the decision, 1947 and 1948 being the two busiest filing years of the whole run. Onto this private machinery the federal government laid its own. The Home Owners' Loan Corporation, surveying cities over 40,000 from 1935, graded South Bend's neighborhoods A through D with the help of local real-estate men, and its South Bend descriptions survive: Harter Heights took its A in part for its "lack of Negros or other infiltration," its residents safely "[n]ative white"; Jefferson Park, Coquillard Woods and Sunnymeade were likewise A-rated, Sunnymeade "highly restricted" by covenant and therefore "[p]robably best section of the city." A C went to the blocks "Olive, from Western to Huron" — "the best of the foreign sections," 95 percent Polish with three Black families, an "infiltration" that barred any higher grade.

The D grades named their reason: one area was a "[h]ighly undesirable settlement of Negroes with only outlet on Prairie Ave"; Beck's Lake was rated D-5, "[n]egro [l]aboring class"; Linden Place D-6, "Negro and foreign-born," with an "[i]nfiltration of Negro." One of the local professionals the federal surveyors relied on was A. C. Colpaert, the builder-realtor the historian Derick Webb calls "an ardent segregationist," who appears in the record declaring at a housing fight, "There will be no niggers west of here" — and who recurs in this section as the contractor who built Black families "plaster board box" houses and as the seller in Dorothy Smith's third displacement. The Federal Housing Administration's 1936 Underwriting Manual recommended the same covenants and zoning for the same stated purpose — guarding against "infiltration of inharmonious racial groups" — and the FHA's own maps, more influential over decades than HOLC's, were mostly destroyed when litigation began in the 1960s. The map of South Bend that survives, dated 1937 in the Mapping Inequality archive, is the one reproduced in studies of this record since: the geography the rest of this section's fights were fought on.

Sources:

1. City of South Bend, Final Report of the Reparatory Justice Commission (2026), Parts II–III — the sixty-eight covenant plats of 1922–1953 and the Board of Public Works' approvals; the twelve post-1948 plats; the HOLC area descriptions for Harter Heights, Sunnymeade, Olive Street, Prairie Avenue, Beck's Lake (D-5) and Linden Place (D-6); Colpaert's role and words; the FHA manual language and the destruction of the FHA maps.
2. Mapping Inequality (University of Richmond) and the Fair Housing Center of Central Indiana — the 1937 HOLC security map of South Bend and Mishawaka.