The night of 26 July 1967 · the curfew

26 JULY 1967

The full record of this night — its grievances, its documents, its long aftermath — is Black History's; here is the night as the city lived it: The LaSalle Park neighborhood, "the Lake," entered that summer with a drained lake turned city dump still burning beside it and streets unpaved. With Detroit and Newark in flames that July, Mayor Lloyd Allen and council members had met Black citizens at the LaSalle Park neighborhood center to head off trouble. On the night of Wednesday, 26 July, trouble came anyway. Youths at the center were ordered back inside and effectively trapped there; one threw a chair through a window to get out; police mistook the shattering for a gunshot, and two officers fired their shotguns into the broken window, injuring six Black youths, after which Captain Stachowicz fired a submachine gun into the ceiling. No gun was found on anyone. Outside, officers arrested Melvin Phillips, twenty-one, who had come from his evening's work to get his younger brother out of the building. Handcuffed, Phillips broke away; Sergeant Roy Jensen ordered "stop that man"; Officer Jerome Szweda loosed a police dog; and Officer Ronald St. Germain shot him at close range. Specialists in Indianapolis saved his life; his leg was amputated.

The city's machinery answered the same night: Mayor Allen imposed a curfew at 10:07 p.m. and asked the governor for 300 National Guard troops, with 700 more on standby. The curfew held, and was lifted Thursday. South Bend did not burn that week, as Detroit had; what it got instead was a reckoning in instalments — the Phillips family's compensation of $11.75 a week against medical bills over $2,000, the Melvin Phillips Fund organized out of Notre Dame, and, credited by Lynn Coleman, who grew up at the Lake, with finally forcing the city's hand on the park itself: the dump became LaSalle Park, and the Charles Black Recreation Center opened on the ground in November 1968. Eight months later, on 5 April 1968, four thousand of the city's people marched to the courthouse in memory of Dr. King — that march, and everything around this night, is told whole in Black History.

Sources:

1. This build's Black History section (article "July 1967 and April 1968"), from the IU South Bend Civil Rights Heritage Center's African American Landmark Tour — the night at the center: the chair through the window, the shotguns and the six injured youths, the Stachowicz volley, the Phillips arrest and shooting with the officers named, the 10:07 p.m. curfew and the National Guard request (300 troops, 700 on standby), the curfew lifted Thursday; the recreation center's approval in November 1967 and opening in November 1968; The Observer and Notre Dame Scholastic (December 1967) on the amputation, the $11.75 a week and the Phillips Fund; the City of South Bend's Final Report of the Reparatory Justice Commission (2026) — Lynn Coleman's account crediting the shooting with prompting the park's creation.