Racial integration in Elkhart public schools advanced cautiously through the latter half of the last century, a slow patchwork of progress in the community's shifting social fabric.
The city early on -- in the 1940s and '50s -- largely stayed a step ahead of desegregation demands by courts and civil rights groups that called for equal education for students nationwide, regardless of race.
Elkhart's South Side School, the only all-black school the district ever mandated, had been closed nearly a decade by the time federal troops shepherded the Little Rock Nine into an Arkansas high school resistant to integration efforts in 1957.
On the books, school segregation had ended here in 1948. But for all practical purposes, the issue persisted: Students went to schools in their neighborhoods, which generally kept white children on the city's north side and black children on the south side.
The problem reached its peak in the 1960s and '70s.
At one May 1971 meeting with city and school officials, black community leaders called for further racial integration through busing.
"If we can't move into the neighborhood, then bus us in," Edith Pasley, then-president of the Elkhart County NAACP branch, was quoted as saying in The Elkhart Truth. "Blacks will move in if you aren't careful because they want the good schools and good teachers also."
The schools superintendent at the time, Harold Oyer, favored the approach of fostering understanding between the races. He told Pasley, "Just throwing bodies together does not create understanding."
Looking back, other people involved in the issue during its heyday now say they see the importance of both schools of thought -- bringing students together physically and in a larger social sense.
James Pyles oversaw the school district-appointed committee on integration for two years in the late 1970s. Based on the panel's recommendations, the district began busing students to the then-four junior high schools.
The school board rejected another recommendation that would also have further integrated the elementary grades.
In the early days of busing, Pyles said this week, black students and white students attending school together for the first time often were "like ships passing in the night" -- strangers in the same building.
"Integration, in my opinion, means including students in all programs, not just a physical mixing of bodies in the hallways," he said. "What happened was when they bused kids a long way, they couldn't participate in after-school activities together."
Even before integration-related busing began in 1980, the school system tried to smooth relations among students by expanding extra-curricular programs and adding a black history course at the high school level, said Robert Franklin, a former assistant superintendent.
But the national turbulence of the preceding decades manifested itself in local schools from time to time. Race-induced fights, name-calling and tension closed Elkhart High School for several days at a time in the early 1970s. The passing of time and support from the community eventually helped quell the disturbances, Franklin said.
"In the '60s and '70s, there were some bad feelings," he said. "It was a nationwide phenomenon, but we certainly had expressions of it here."
As the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement played out in the South, Elkhart's minority student population nearly doubled as a percentage from 7.2 percent in 1966 -- the first year such records were kept -- to 13.4 percent in 1979.
Numbers compiled by the schools at the time painted a telling picture of integration during those years.
For example, in fall 1966, all but 11 of the minority elementary students in the district went to five schools, all in central or southern areas of the city. Among black junior high school students that year, just 10 did not attend either Pierre Moran or West Side.
By fall 1979, every school had some minority students, according to data reported in The Elkhart Truth in May 1980. Two elementaries, Hawthorne and Roosevelt, had about 300 black students -- at least 200 more than any other grade school in the district at the time. Meanwhile, Pierre Moran enrolled 330 of 436 minority junior high schoolers in the district.
Such statistics -- as well as the district's decision to integrate mostly at the junior high level -- led the local chapter of the NAACP to file a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights in 1979, charging that school officials weren't doing enough to resolve the city's segregation issues.
An investigation by the government office concluded that while Elkhart schools indeed were racially imbalanced, district officials hadn't done anything to inhibit integration.
"I think that all of the schools pretty much show a level of integration now," said Cora Breckenridge, a longtime member of the local NAACP and a member of the organization's national board. "I think that a lot of what is presently in place in the Elkhart schools came as a result of some struggle. It didn't come easily, but that's true all over the nation."
At an NAACP meeting this spring, Breckenridge met the nine black students who helped usher integration into that Little Rock, Ark., high school 50 years ago. The experience moved her.
"We have benefited as a community from that kind of courage that they displayed in 1957," said Breckenridge, a retired educator. "That opened the door for so many students in this country to stand up and say, 'I want a first-class education too.'"
In a smaller way, Pyles, the integration task force chairman, suspects his former committee made a difference too. The group brought attention to an important issue without creating a widespread uproar in the community, he said.
Most of the resistance that integration did face here, he said in retrospect, probably wasn't racist in nature. Rather, it may have been motivated by people's basic fear of change.
"I faced questions from a lot of angry parents," Pyles said. "It was hard trying to convince the community that integration was going to be a good thing."