The next Deans’ Seminar in the 2023-24 series will be held this Friday, November 17, 2023. Monica Tetzlaff, Associate Professor of History, will present her research entitled “African Activists: Swimming Pools, a Pool Hall, and Police Brutality: The Streets’ Family’s Participation in the Long Civil Rights Movement in the Midwest.”
We will meet at noon in the UCET Classroom (NS245). Feel free to bring your lunch. Soft drinks and water will be provided.
Abstract:
My research analyzes South Bend’s civil rights movement, from 1930-1971, through the papers of the Streets family. I follow the gendered actions of dentist Bernard Streets, and Odie Mae Streets, also an activist and the spouse of Bernard. Bernard and Odie Mae Streets were not singular in South Bend — they worked in community with Black leaders and, sometimes, white allies. Black men, including Bernard Streets, organized an exclusive political club, located above a pool hall. One of the aims of the local civil rights movement was to create other locations, besides pool halls, where Black young people spend leisure time. In the 1930s the Streets revived the local NAACP, along with another couple, J. Chester and Elizabeth Fletcher Allen, who were both attorneys. The NAACP successfully ended segregation in movie theatres, and exclusion from the Engman Natatorium. Odie Mae Streets studied Spanish and aided local Latinas through the YWCA. She also helped launch the first Head Start program. In the 1960s Bernard Streets served on the newly formed Human Relations and Fair Employment Commission, which took on racial exclusion and police brutality at a local bar. I argue that the gendered roles of these activists were both traditional and fluid, and that the right to recreate was a major area of contention in the local civil rights struggle.