New Orleans area Catholic schools integrated 2 years after the city's public schools
Bruce Nolan, The Times-Picayune
In New Orleans the day after Labor Day in 1962, almost 200 African-American children began arriving at many of the 153 Catholic elementary and high schools that the Archdiocese of New Orleans previously reserved only for white families.
On that day 48 years ago, seventh-grader Cynthia Soniat, 12 years old but lady-like in her pressed cotton dress and shiny black flats, walked to her first day of school at all-white Mater Dolorosa Elementary in Carrollton.
She and her eighth-grade brother, Donald, were there because their father, Llewelyn, a civil rights activist, wanted his black children to help breach the racial barriers he had spent his life assaulting.
A little more than two miles away, 14-year-old Lawrence Haydel Jr. arrived for his freshman year at all-white Jesuit High School, although his enrollment was a triumph of pragmatism over principle. His father, a black 7th Ward contractor raising 12 children, had pounced on the school's offer of free tuition.
Anthony Rachal also started that year at Jesuit, having picked it over Xavier Prep as both a challenge and a chance to grasp the opportunity denied to his friends, his parents and other black New Orleanians.
Many entered through generally peaceful but ominous knots of sullen parents. With some notable, ugly exceptions in Westwego and Buras, where there were boycotts, threats and vandalism, the transition passed without major public turmoil.
But that was on the surface.
Some of those first students remember that after the crowds dispersed, the years that followed were often difficult in the small, lacerating ways secretly embedded in a child or adolescent's school life.
While many made friends across racial lines, there were also anonymous insults in locker rooms and cafeterias, or psychic welts left by a teacher's cruel public remarks.
Trailblazing would come at a cost.
While New Orleans this weekend commemorates the 50th anniversary of public school integration, it took another two years for the Archdiocese of New Orleans to integrate its 75,000-student system, despite a clear moral imperative to do so.
Partly because of the two-year interval, Catholic integration is remembered as a comparative success. If there was popular opposition, it was less vitriolic, without the backdrop of shrieking white mothers, federal marshals and massive public resistance.
But records show the delay infuriated thousands of black Catholics and deeply embarrassed a relative handful of progressive white Catholics, all of whom thought the church had missed the chance to lead at a moment requiring moral courage.
The story of the conversations around integration at archdiocesan headquarters on Walmsley Avenue is still not fully told.
Emilie Leumas, the church's archivist, said the papers of then-Archbishop Joseph Francis Rummel are still being catalogued and are not yet available to historians.
But other records are available at other repositories, and several histories of Catholic integration have been written without access to the Rummel papers.
Rummel had served in Harlem
Among the central unanswered questions: What were the counsels that led the church to postpone integration from as early as 1957 all the way to 1962, behind even the public school system?
At the center of the storm lay Rummel, toward the end blind, elderly and nearly infirm -- who had led the New Orleans church since 1935.
A liberal churchman who had once served in Harlem, Rummel, beginning in the late 1940s, used increasingly strong words and actions to tell New Orleans area Catholics that racial segregation was wrong, and would have to come to an end.
By many accounts, throughout the second half of the 1950s, Rummel pushed white Catholic parents toward integration faster than they wanted, but not so quickly as to blow up his congregations, empty his white Catholic schools, or trigger retaliation from a defiant state Legislature threatening to withdraw textbooks and transportation.
As early as 1949, Rummel had canceled a large Catholic worship service at City Park rather than segregate it, as the park board demanded.
Two years later he ordered church seating integrated. Two years after that he declared all segregation unacceptable. And in 1956, he issued a blunt public letter using the full power of his teaching office to make it plain:
Segregation is "morally wrong and sinful because it is a denial of the unity and solidarity of the human race as conceived by God in the creation of man in Adam and Eve," he wrote.
La. vowed massive resistance
But as federal courts pushed New Orleans public schools toward integration on a parallel track, white politicians, segregationist white Citizens Councils and neighborhood groups lashed back, unleashing angry denunciations of integration as un-biblical, Communist-inspired and a threat to racial superiority.
The Legislature vowed massive resistance, and soon enough would threaten Catholic schools with loss of aid if they segregated.
While local politicians like Plaquemines Parish's Leander Perez denounced every new civil rights lawsuit, Catholic segregationists picketed Rummel's residence and burned a cross on his lawn.
In 2002, researchers Diane T. Manning and Perry Rogers found in the records of a church-affiliated lay group, called the Catholic Council of Human Relations, evidence that the archdiocese had a well-developed plan to integrate its schools for the 1957-58 school year.
But it held off.
Justin Poché, a historian at Holy Cross College who has written extensively on Catholic school integration, said Rummel probably saw his moral exhortations were having no effect in the pews, where they would have to be lived.
In one particularly infamous episode in 1959 -- eight years after segregated seating had been nominally banned -- parishioners of St. Joseph the Worker Church in Marrero badly beat two black youths who, for a second time, sat themselves in the front pews for Sunday Mass.
Moreover, Poché said, Rummel deeply valued harmony. He wanted change -- even if radical -- to come organically. The more vigorous secular civil rights approach of taking it to the streets "just wasn't in his vocabulary."
In 1959, the archdiocese announced that Catholic schools would be integrated "at the earliest possible opportunity, and definitely not later than when the public schools are integrated."
But by 1960, Rummel was approaching 84 and failing physically.
"I think it was a combination of pressure from above and below, compounded by the fact that he's sick and can't stand as symbol of progress in the city," Poche said. "That, and his theological perspective that he doesn't see it as his calling to disrupt society."
According to historian Liva Baker's "The Second Battle of New Orleans," an account of New Orleans public school desegregation, as public schools approached their fateful date, Rummel issued a letter to be read from Catholic pulpits.
While warning of the "chaos and moral irresponsibility" offered by public resistance to public school desegregation, Rummel said the church remained committed to integration, but again declined to set a date.
'Rummel didn't want chaos'
The Rev. William Maestri, who has seen some of the Rummel papers, said in a 2004 interview that civil authorities urged the archdiocese not to integrate alongside the public school system as a matter of public safety.
In 1961, a year after public schools were integrated, the archdiocese created the Catholic Council on Human Relations. Led by Executive Director Henry Cabriac and New Orleans lawyer C. Ellis Henican, the committee set for itself the task to join others pushing the church toward integration.
"Rummel didn't want chaos. He thought, if chaos ensued then his pastoral plan of integration would have failed, even if there were black kids sitting in the schools," said Poché, the historian. "But after 1960, these lay committees are saying, 'We're past that now.'"
Meanwhile, the Vatican sent a new archbishop, John Patrick Cody, to work alongside the failing Rummel.
John Patrick Cody was named Coadjutor Archbishop of New Orleans by the Vatican in 1961 to assist Archbishop Rummel and he oversaw the complete integration of the archdiocesan school system. He became Archbishop of New Orleans after Rummel's death in 1964.
Brusque, authoritarian and self-confident, Cody almost certainly picked up the pace.
"Cody wouldn't relent on much," Poché said. "He sort of stepped in. They brought him in so Rummel could take credit for integration and Cody could take the blame.
"He drew the heat away from Rummel and Cody didn't mind that in the least."
In March 1962, the archdiocese announced that its schools would integrate in the fall. Rummel reportedly approved it from his hospital bed.
Unhappily, Our Lady of Good Harbor School in Buras, deep in the Leander Perez segregationist heartland, opened two weeks before other Catholic schools with a fraction of its normal population, as angry crowds surveyed the arrival of black children and a sound truck played "Dixie."
Black parents were intimidated into withdrawing their children, and the school closed. The empty building was bombed before the 1963 school year and shut down for good.
In addition, The Times-Picayune reported a few days later that at Our Lady of Prompt Succor Parish in Westwego, a crowd smashed the car windshield of a black mother retrieving her child from school, where enrollment fell precipitously.
All told, however, Catholic schools in New Orleans held their enrollments for the short term, before white flight to the suburbs set in ensuing years.
At the end of September, church authorities reported enrollment at 97 percent of the previous year's figure for the full 10-parish archdiocese.
Mixed emotions
Forty eight years later, the memories of the first African-American students to attend all-white institutions are even more complex than the usual, layered memories of adolescence.
Haydel, the contractor's son who went on to become a contractor himself, values the Jesuit education he received, as well as the support he felt from most of the administration and faculty.
But Haydel says his four years were marked by numerous little cruelties amidst the occasional friendships.
"I can't say I enjoyed the experience, because I didn't. But I can say I enjoyed the benefit of the experience," he said. "Things were just hard for kids in strange environments."
Rachal has the same take.
He left Jesuit after two years for Washington, D.C., where he works now as a lawyer. He served for a time on the District of Columbia's utility regulatory commission.
"For me, it was a life-changing situation," he said.
Before desegregating an all-white high school, "I had been on a conventional path ... like an old pair of shoes," Rachal said. "Educationally, no doubt, it was the right decision. Socially, it was the wrong decision."
He added: "I'm glad I did it, although at some points I doubt myself, whether it was the right thing to do.
"I look back on it with mixed emotions."
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