The pool that became a conscience: the Civil Rights Heritage Center

1922 - 2010

The natatorium: In 1922, the year the Palace Theatre opened, South Bend opened the Engman Public Natatorium, its first public swimming pool, with the word "public" carved into its facade. It excluded African Americans entirely for fourteen years, then admitted them on segregated terms for fourteen more, until lawyers J. Chester Allen and Elizabeth Fletcher Allen, representing the local NAACP, won full integration in February 1950. The pool closed in 1978 and stood derelict for three decades. The fight over the pool belongs to the civil rights record; its second life belongs to this section, because what South Bend chose to make of the building is a cultural decision of the first order.

The centre: The Civil Rights Heritage Center formed at Indiana University South Bend in 2000, out of students who had travelled south on a Freedom Summer course. On 23 May 2010 the natatorium reopened as the Center's home: the city had sold the site to South Bend Heritage for one dollar, which passed it to the university, also for one dollar. The echo is exact and this section states it once, plainly: the city's two great one-dollar buildings are a vaudeville palace saved by a philanthropist in 1959 and a segregated swimming pool redeemed by a university and a neighbourhood in 2010. The building was designated a local historic landmark in 2018, and the Center, a living museum of the region's civil rights history, draws more than 5,000 visitors a year. A place built to keep Black South Bend out is now the institution charged with teaching South Bend what happened there. No building in this section carries a heavier cultural meaning per dollar.

Sources:

1. Indiana University South Bend, African American Landmark Tour (the Engman Natatorium built 1922 as the city's first public pool; fourteen years of exclusion and fourteen of segregation; the 1978 closure; the Civil Rights Heritage Center formed in 2000; the 2010 transformation).
2. Ball State University, Digital Civil Rights Museum (J. Chester Allen, Elizabeth Fletcher Allen and Maurice Tulchinsky for the NAACP before the Parks Board, February 1950; full integration from 1950; more than 5,000 visitors a year).
3. City of South Bend ordinance 33-18, 2018 (local historic landmark designation for 1040 West Washington Street; the building's history as stated in the ordinance).
4. Civil Rights Heritage Center institutional accounts (the $1 sale from the city to South Bend Heritage and the onward $1 transfer to Indiana University South Bend; the dedication of 23 May 2010).