South Bend Civic revives Better Homes' story with play it commissioned

Jenny Miller’s cough medicine put an extra strain on her family’s monthly budget.

Junior Smith was a growing boy “eating everything in sight.”

Their mothers calculated how they might save a few cents a pound of meat and stretch meals a little further.

Money was already tight for the Black Studebaker workers, whose escape from the substandard living conditions surrounding the factory in the 1950s is the subject of “Better Homes: The Play'' by Caleen Sinnette Jennings.

The production, commissioned by South Bend Civic Theatre, premieres Friday and continues through Nov. 19 and is based on the book “Better Homes of South Bend: An American Story of Courage” by Gabrielle Robinson. An additional public performance takes place Nov. 30 at The History Museum, which recently converted its Worker's Home from that of a Polish family in the 1930s to that of a Black family in the 1950s.

Local history: Worker's Home transformed to show Black family's struggles and triumphs in 1950s

Redlining and restrictive housing covenants were among the open secrets of segregation that kept Black families out of certain neighborhoods across the country. In South Bend, a group of families began to meet in secret to strategize the purchase of a parcel of land in a predominantly white area of the city. Despite setbacks and hostile neighbors, their group, Better Homes of South Bend, became one of the first successful Black housing cooperatives in Indiana and built 22 homes on North Elmer Street.

Until recent years, their story had all but faded from South Bend’s collective memory. One of the last surviving co-op members, Leroy Cobb, recognized the importance of preserving its history and convinced Robinson, a now-retired English professor from Indiana University South Bend, to research the story. Her book came out in 2015. Two years later, the state installed a historic marker in the Better Homes neighborhood, and Civic began making plans to commission a stage adaptation of the story.

“The best kind of local story is the one that's not, that's not kind of rooted in trauma, but rooted in triumphs,” Civic Executive Director Aaron Nichols said.

He envisioned the Better Homes story as a way to celebrate a remarkable local accomplishment while bringing awareness to the larger issue of housing discrimination. The play, he noted, helps humanize the history and data points surrounding redlining and their implications for today.

“Caleen did a great job of saying, ‘This work is not done,'” he said.

For Jennings, a professor of theater emerita at American University in Washington, D.C., the message of Robinson’s book is: “It was done before. We can do it again.”

“I hope when people walk out, they say, 'Oh my gosh, we can do this again. We do have agency,'” she said. “I'm hoping people will feel empowered. I'm hoping people will say, ‘My God, if these courageous folks could do this at a time when racism was even more overt, and at a time when they were risking their jobs, let us at least explore the possibility of doing it again. Let us at least explore the fact that things haven't changed as much as they should have changed. And let us also come together as allies.'”

A composite story

Jennings interviewed Better Homes families and used their stories to create the play’s fictional Smith family.

“That gave me the room to tell the story in the broadest sense,” she said. “You’ll see a little bit of all of the families that I interviewed. And that was really the way that I made peace with the fact that folks had trusted me to tell their story. It felt like a tremendous responsibility.”

Jennings hopes the audience will see a bit of their own families reflected on stage in the sibling squabbles, parental scoldings, their love for one another and their willingness to take a risk. “That’s another important way theater makes change,” she said.

She also incorporates historical figures, including the Black attorney J. Chester Allen, who represented the co-op; his white colleague George Sands, who sold the parcel to the group; and co-op president Lureatha Allen.

And, Jennings said, she worked to convey the uncertainty the Better Homes families lived with as they worked toward their goal. “There were setbacks … and people had to really dig deep and do a lot of soul searching to hang in there and to get to where they wanted to go,” she said.

Robinson says she was overwhelmed when she sat in on a reading of an earlier draft of the play.

“I was in tears. It is so emotional,” she said, explaining how the play brought to life the profound role religion played in the lives of the Better Homes families.

“They've been through so much racism and hardship. They found solace and hope and belief in a better future there,” she said. “And I can write about that, but she could show it through the hymns. They sang. And it just brings so much more to life than you can in history.”

Onstage

● What: Caleen Sinnette Jennings' "Better Homes: The Play," based on the book "Better Homes of South Bend: An American Story of Courage" by Gabrielle Robinson

● Where: South Bend Civic Theatre, 403 N. Main St., South Bend

● When: 7:30 p.m. Nov. 10-11 and 16-18 and at 2 p.m. Nov. 12 and 19. Pre-show discussions with Gabrielle Robinson take place at 6:50 p.m. Nov. 11 and 18 and at 1:20 p.m. Nov. 12 and 19. Talk-backs follow each performance.

● An additional performance takes place at 7 p.m. Nov. 30 at The History Museum, 897 Thomas St., South Bend. A tour of The History Museum's Worker's Home precedes the performance, a talk-back with Robinson and Elmer Street family members follows the performance.

● Cost: $35-$25

● For more information: Call 574-234-1112 or visit sbct.org.

This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: South Bend Civic Theatre premieres play about local Black history