Better Homes of South Bend
Near South Bend, Indiana
In nineteen fifty, a group of Black workers at the Studebaker auto plant did something quietly revolutionary. Many had come north from the South in the nineteen forties to escape Jim Crow, only to find that banks and real estate agents in Indiana would not lend to them on equal terms, trapping them in run down housing. So they pooled their money and formed a building cooperative called Better Homes of South Bend.
Working together, the co-op secured land, loans, and contractors that no single family could have gotten alone. By the mid nineteen fifties they had built a row of homes on North Elmer Street, creating a thriving Black neighborhood in what had been a white part of town. The state later placed a marker here.
