The Black population series, 1850–2020

1850 — 2020

The census counted Black South Bend from the first city return, and for seventy years it counted a small community in an immigrant city: In 1850 the enumerators found 18 free Black residents in South Bend — Indiana law counted no enslaved people, and the census's own columns show all 18 as free — 1.1 percent of the town. The series then runs: 68 in 1860, 73 in 1870, 214 in 1880, 280 in 1890, 572 in 1900, 604 in 1910, and 1,269 in 1920, never above 1.8 percent of a city whose factories recruited their thousands from Europe. The community behind these figures — its churches, its west-side streets, its ordeal and its movement — is told in the Communities and Black history sections. The count's own turning point is the First World War: the Black population doubled in the 1910s as war production pulled Southern workers north, and the South Bend Tribune estimated it at about 3,000 by 1922 — an estimate, printed as one; the decade's census, in 1930, counted 3,431, so the estimate's level was reached by the count within the decade, on the far side of the 1923 episode the city's Reparatory Justice Commission documents, in which more than a thousand Black residents fled the city within days of a Klan threat. The 1930 census counted a community that had grown through all of it.

The second transformation is written in the middle censuses. The count stood at 3,555 in 1940 (3.5 percent), then more than doubled in the war decade to 8,134 in 1950 (7.0 percent), rose to 12,955 in 1960 (9.8 percent), 17,737 in 1970 (14.1 percent), 20,066 in 1980 (18.3 percent) and 22,049 in 1990 (20.9 percent) — the Great Migration and its second wave, arriving in South Bend on the same decades' lag as in the rest of the industrial North, and continuing to grow through the very decades in which the city's total was falling, so that the share rose even faster than the count. The modern censuses, which count race on the non-Hispanic basis used in the next entry, put the Black population at 26,259 in 2000 (24.4 percent), 26,496 in 2010 (26.2 percent) and 26,102 in 2020 (25.2 percent): a community at its counted peak in 2010, essentially level across the last three counts, and a quarter of the city. Every figure in this series is the census's own — the Bureau's historical race compilation carries the city decade by decade from 1850 to 1990 on the categories the 1990 census used, and the 2000–2020 figures continue it on the modern non-Hispanic basis; the break in categories between 1990 and 2000 is the census's, and it is flagged here rather than smoothed over.

Sources:

1. Campbell Gibson and Kay Jung, Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, 1790 to 1990, and by Hispanic Origin, 1970 to 1990, for Large Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States, U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division Working Paper No. 76 (February 2005), Table 15 (Indiana) — South Bend: total and Black population at every census 1850–1990 (1850: 18, all free; 1920: 1,269; 1950: 8,134; 1970: 17,737; 1990: 22,049), with the sample-based variants the Bureau prints for 1970–1990.
2. City of South Bend, Reparatory Justice Commission Final Report (2026) — the 1920 count of 1,269 as carried in Rev. Buford Gordon's history; the South Bend Tribune's 1922 estimate of about 3,000, printed here as an estimate; the 1923 flight of more than 1,000 residents after a Klan threat letter.
3. Carol O. Rogers, "Black and White in Indiana," Indiana Business Review (Summer 2005) — the Bureau's decade percentage changes for South Bend's Black population (1910–1920: +110 percent; 1940–1950: +129; 1950–1960: +59; 1960–1970: +37; 1980–1990: +10), each of which the counts printed above reproduce.
4. U.S. Census Bureau, censuses of 2000, 2010 and 2020 — Black alone, non-Hispanic: 26,259 (24.36 percent), 26,496 (26.19 percent), 26,102 (25.23 percent).