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1967 – 1968
The city's modern unrest, at this section's size: In July 1967, after a South Bend police officer shot Melvin Phillips, the city's west side rose in nights of disorder that ended with a curfew imposed at 10:07 p.m. and a request for the National Guard — the closest this city came in the 1960s to the full pattern of the American urban uprisings, and an episode whose movement record — the grievances under it, the Natatorium's long shadow, the leadership that contained it — is carried whole in the Black History section and pointed to here. Nine months later the same streets held the opposite image: on 5 April 1968, the day after Dr. King's assassination in Memphis, some four thousand people marched in memorial through South Bend in a demonstration organized by Dr. Roland Chamblee and George Neagu — a crowd larger than the town that buried John Auten, assembled in grief and kept in order. The two Aprils and the July between them are this city's civil-rights era in miniature, and they are cross-referenced here at survey size because Black History owns their telling.
Sources:
- The Black History section of this history — the shooting of Melvin Phillips, the July 1967 curfew at 10:07 p.m. and the Guard request, and the memorial march of 5 April 1968 (some 4,000 people; organized by Dr. Roland Chamblee and George Neagu), cross-referenced at this section's size.