A Place with Purpose: Hering House, 1925-1963
by Lisa Swedarsky
The second in the On Their Shoulders series of South Bend regional Civil Rights books, researched and written by a graduate of the Master of Liberal Studies program at IU South Bend, this volume outlines the history of Hering House, a community center for South Bend’s Black community. Founded in 1924 by Frank Hering, a history and economics professor at the University of Notre Dame, the center was open to and used by the Black community for the next 30 years. The history and purpose of Hering House is complex: it was funded by and named for a white man and his wife, its board of directors was always mostly white, and once the goals of integration were more widely accepted, it began to fall out of use. In this book, these complexities of the House’s history are presented alongside continual reminders of its importance to local community life through the first half of the 20th century. Illustrated.
