“We are All Brothers Under the Skin”: Odie Mae and Bernard Streets and the Long Civil Rights Movement in South Bend, Indiana

ABSTRACT: Monica Tetzlaff relates the history of Odie Mae and Bernard Streets, a middle-class African American couple, providing a look at the long civil rights movement in South Bend, Indiana. Bernard, a dentist, and Odie Mae, a homemaker and later a Head Start teacher, were part of the middle-class leadership group of the NAACP and other organizations from the 1930s, through World War II, and into the turbulent 1960s, when their adult children became leaders. The intergenerational story of the Streets family, which moves from the upper South to northern Indiana, reveals only a portion of the Black struggle for equality, but their stories shed light on important themes for Black Hoosiers: the right to recreate, the freedom to own a home of one’s choice, and the right to be free of police brutality. The intersectionality that Odie Mae found with Latina women’s rights and Head Start’s empowerment for low-income parents and children of all races is part of the Streetses’ message that we are all brothers and sisters “under the skin.”