Black South Bend's leaders: the lawyers, the nurse, and the council presidents

1900 – present

J. Chester Allen (born 1900) and Elizabeth Fletcher Allen: the attorneys who opened the pool. J. Chester Allen was born in 1900 at Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and practiced law in South Bend with his wife, Elizabeth Fletcher Allen — Indiana's first female African American lawyer. Their Natatorium campaign is the city's cleanest civil-rights story, and its people are these two. From 1931 the Allens worked the NAACP's petition campaign against the whites-only rule at the city-owned Engman Natatorium (built 1922). In 1936, after the Common Council levied a repair tax on all residents, Allen led the charge on the taxpayer argument to the state: Black residents paid for the pool and were barred from it. The result was partial and dated exactly — from October 1936 Black swimmers were admitted on Mondays only.

Elizabeth Allen's part is documented with a caveat the record itself insists on: oral history and secondary sources credit her with drawing up the original complaint and advising the cause throughout, but her name is absent from the official documents — she was still in law school, and the campaign feared a Black woman's name on the papers would hurt the cause. In February 1950 the Allens, with white attorney Maurice Tulchinsky, represented the NAACP before the Park Board, threatened suit, and the board relented: the Natatorium was fully desegregated in 1950, fourteen years of total ban and fourteen of segregated admission ended. When a board member answered Allen with a communist smear, his reply — preserved in the Indiana History Blog's account — stands as the campaign's voice. In the 1950s the Allens helped Black Studebaker workers form the Better Homes of South Bend building cooperative (formed 21 May 1950) against discriminatory lending and real-estate practice. The pool fight's movement record stands in the Black history section; the two lawyers stand here, with Elizabeth's authorship restored at the strength her record carries — credited by the community's memory, unsigned on the papers, both facts printed.

Helen Pope: the nurse who desegregated the workplaces. Pope, a South Bend nurse and community activist, worked — in the IUSB archives' summary of her papers — in organizations locally, statewide and nationally for civil rights and the needs of African Americans, women and the poor, with her activism aimed specifically at desegregating health care facilities and factories, the two institutions where Black South Bend earned and was healed. She held leadership roles in Model Cities, the Job Corps, neighborhood improvement associations, African American women's groups, and area day-care efforts, and was president of the Our Day Together Club in 1996, when it held its Christmas dinner program at Olivet AME. Her papers were received by the IU South Bend Archives in the spring of 2007, and an IUSB scholarship carries her name. She is not a Natatorium figure — the documented pool leaders are the Allens — and this record keeps her on her own ground: the hospitals, the factory gates, and the organizational infrastructure of a community.

The documented generation around them: Jesse Dickinson, an African American reporter and politician who served in the Indiana legislature, was one of the thirteen Black taxpayers who signed the October 1936 Natatorium petition — the press and the petition in one signature. Dr. Bernard Streets was one of the first African American dentists in South Bend; his papers, like Dickinson's, are held in the Civil Rights Heritage Center collections at IU South Bend, and the record read for this section gives his profession and his place among the first, and no more — the entry prints him at that size. Alma Powell, a longtime educator, was the first woman of color to serve as a principal in the South Bend schools and a leader of the 1980s school desegregation effort. Lynn Coleman grew up on Kenmore Street in the Lake community, became a South Bend police officer, served as assistant to two mayors, and ran for the U.S. Congress in 2016.

Charlotte D. Pfeifer-Gillam: the council's first Black president. A native Ohioan raised in Michigan, Pfeifer-Gillam has lived in South Bend for more than fifty years; she took a B.A. in history at IU South Bend in 1976 and a master's in public administration in 1981, became the area's first Black female adult probation officer and the first Black female director of Delos House, a residential substance-abuse treatment program, and returned to IUSB in 1995 to found its Office of Campus Diversity. Elected to the South Bend Common Council in 1995, she served until 2007 and became the body's first Black president, holding the presidency for three terms. She ran the campus Conversations on Race series from 1997 to 2007 and helped pass the quality-of-life ordinances of her council years, among them the long-fought expansion of the city's Human Rights Ordinance to add sexual orientation and gender identity, finally passed in 2011. Karen White, a longtime Common Council representative and a member of senior leadership at IU South Bend, belongs to the same civic generation; Gladys Muhammad, a community organizer from the LaSalle Park/Lake community, has been associate director of the South Bend Heritage Foundation — with the foundation since 1974 — founded a shelter for battered women, and led the West Washington Community Revitalization Project against redlining. In the present generation the record names Regina Williams-Preston, a Black council member of the 2010s. All of the living appear here only as the public record states them.

Alonzo Watson: a thin entry, printed thin. The record reached for this section documents Watson at two points: reappointed to the city's Human Rights Commission at the Common Council meeting of 11 February 1980, and speaking as Director of the Housing Authority of South Bend at the council meeting of 23 March 1987, when he reported a waiting list of 455 applications and a scattered-site acquisition program. Alonzo Watson Park, west of Chapin Street, came out of the 1968 Chapin Street Urban Renewal Project and carries his name. His vital dates are not established in the sources read, and a namesake — a Chicago-born Spanish Civil War volunteer of the same name, killed in 1937 — is a different man and is not him; a park-guide website's story that a local businessman donated the park land in the 1920s is unverified aggregator material and is not used. What is documented is a housing administrator's public service in the renewal era, and a park.

Sources:

1. Ball State University, Digital Civil Rights Museum of Fort Wayne (South Bend entries) — the Allens' NAACP work from 1931, the 1936 taxpayer argument and the Mondays-only result of October 1936, the February 1950 Park Board hearing with Maurice Tulchinsky, and the 1950 desegregation.
2. Indiana History Blog (Indiana Historical Bureau), "Better Homes of South Bend" — Elizabeth Fletcher Allen's drafting role as oral history carries it and its absence from the official documents; J. Chester Allen's 1950 reply to the communist smear; the Better Homes cooperative of 21 May 1950; Elizabeth Allen as Indiana's first female African American lawyer.
3. IU South Bend Archives and Civil Rights Heritage Center collections — the Helen Pope Collection (received spring 2007) and its summary of her health-care and factory desegregation work, Model Cities and Job Corps leadership, and the Our Day Together Club presidency of 1996; the Dickinson and Streets archival materials; the Natatorium's 1922 construction and 1978 closing.
4. IU South Bend, Distinguished Alumni page, and City of South Bend (2024), Black History Month biography — Charlotte D. Pfeifer-Gillam's degrees, probation and Delos House firsts, the Office of Campus Diversity, the council service 1995–2007 and its first Black presidency, and the Human Rights Ordinance expansion.
5. IU South Bend, African American Landmark Tour — Gladys Muhammad, Lynn Coleman, Alma Powell, and Karen White at the sizes their entries carry.
6. South Bend Common Council minutes, 11 February 1980 and 23 March 1987 (docs.southbendin.gov) — Watson's Human Rights Commission reappointment and his Housing Authority directorship.
7. Government section of this history (banked) — Alonzo Watson Park and the 1968 Chapin Street Urban Renewal Project.