Black South Bend's ground: the west-side geography

1839 — present

The freedom record stands elsewhere; the ground stands here: Black South Bend's full history — the Powell freedom suit of 1849, Olivet A.M.E., the Natatorium campaign of 1922–1950, the Hering House, the civil-rights decades and the city's Reparatory Justice Commission — is told whole in the Black history file of this history, and this entry carries the community geography it stands on. The geography is the west side: the Birdsell–Liston district, where the Urban League counted 81 Black-owned businesses in 1958, along the Western Avenue corridor; Hering House at 726 West Western Avenue, the community center dedicated on 8 March 1925 and closed in 1963; and, from 1968, one survivor of the corridor's commercial world that trades still — Frankie's BBQ, founded that year. South of it, LaSalle Park was the neighborhood the city built after the 1961–64 fight over Beck's Lake. Urban renewal cut this geography as it cut the Hungarian and Polish streets beside it: the city's own Reparatory Justice Commission counts 606 families displaced by the renewal programs by the late 1960s, about three-quarters of them families of color, with the Chapin Street project alone removing 116 families, 104 of them families of color — the counts stand in the government and Black history files, and are cross-referenced here because the streets they emptied are this section's map. The community's present institutions stand on the same ground: the Civil Rights Heritage Center of Indiana University South Bend, housed in the former Engman Public Natatorium — the pool whose exclusion the community fought for three decades — and the city's African American Landmark Tour, which walks the district the renewal era divided.

Sources:

1. Black History & Civil Rights, this history (the full record; the Urban League's 1958 count; Hering House; LaSalle Park) — banked fragment
2. City of South Bend, Reparatory Justice Commission — final report, 5 March 2026 (the 606-family displacement count)
3. Government, this history (the renewal programs and the Chapin Street project) — banked fragment