From Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968:
CHICAGO MARCHING No one on the Mississippi march had to worry, it turned out. The whole business was uneventful, less dangerous than my later walks with hundreds of others in Marquette Park down Western Avenue with Martin Luther King, when he got hit by a brick.
Among suspects might have been young men among whom I recognized some of my students from Ignatius who waved at me from curbside. Another of my students was part of a sort of honor guard wearing baseball mitts and catching rocks.
The Western Avenue marches had come a few days after King did an hour or so revving up us white liberals at Immanuel Lutheran Church, a few blocks from Ignatius on Ashland just north of Roosevelt.
Its pastor, Don Becker, was one of the leaders of our little community organization. With King in town, in the summer of ‘66, churches became a focal point. At Don Becker’s church, there was excitement in the air. Before King arrived, we did a procession through the church and had our kumbaya routine.
I surrendered myself so obviously to these activities that Dick Zipfel, a scholastic on the Ignatius faculty with an interest in such matters, commented on how “black” I looked, supplying irony where it was needed.
Indeed, when King arrived through a side door of the big, Gothic church, I was in the pulpit myself, warming up the folks, and did not stop immediately, which meant I could say later that I had preached while Martin Luther King listened.
Jesse Jackson was with him. Jesse was making his mark in those days as a speechifying barnburner of King’s calibre, if not of his calibre in any other respect. But these were the good doctor’s days. He was at the center.
JUNIOR CATHOLICS A group of high-school and early-college-age men and women were part of the congregation, which probably was no more than 100 in all. These were earnest young folk, mostly white.
They included Linda, a South Sider who had been shocked to see her father defy a cop from their front porch in a racially threatened neighborhood. He and her family were resisting black encroachment—reasonably so, it turned out, because in a few years the neighborhood went all-black and crime-ridden. As of a few years ago, it had become a poster neighborhood for random killing of innocent children.
There were people to blame for that racial change, I was convinced, but today I’m not so sure. Rather, they were caught up in social change of no one’s doing. Blacks and whites were fleeing black neighborhoods. No one wanted to live in them.
We need only compare the Englewood crime rate with what it was when it was white. No contest, with no one to blame but shooters and other criminals.
Linda was living with another Linda, from never racially threatened west suburban Elmhurst. Their apartment was in an old building on State Street just north of Chicago Avenue, long since replaced by a high-rise condo building.
This other Linda would call home, hanging up after three rings, per agreement with her mother, who would call the State Street apartment pronto, saving Linda the cost of a call, this being long before cell phones.
Hugh, my student who caught bricks in Marquette Park, was part of this group. So were several others who formed a sort of junior Catholic Interracial Council of which I was unofficial chaplain.
I more or less chaperoned an overnight stay in a church, in the Cabrini Green projects neighborhood, where a Servite brother, a warm, friendly little guy who later became a Servite priest, was our host.
Breakfasting afterward in the neighborhood, I sensed hostility from the waitress about the blacks among us and got hot. That was me all over. On another occasion, at a U. of Chicago conference where the future fugitive radical Bernardine Dohrn handed out programs in a fetching mini-skirt, which I failed not to notice—she had nice gams, as movie magazines used to say—I tore into a participant who quoted Thomas Aquinas in support of his segregationist views.
Such matters were being debated in those days. As too often was the case, I overdid it, shutting this fellow up and, briefly, everyone else in the crowded in-the-round meeting hall.
NEIGHBORHOOD MEETINGS Later I provided a church-connected meeting place on Ignatius property, in a now long gone Quonset hut, for a protest meeting, not about police brutality or discrimination of any kind but about a series of burglaries in the public-housing high-rise across Roosevelt. We filled the Quonset hut that night because of tenants’ security concerns, which trumped the usual police-brutality and other allegations of race prejudice.
Our speaker was one of King’s Southern Christian lieutenants, Rev. James Bevel, a soft-spoken, clean-cut fellow whom I ran into later at the Daily News waiting room, where he had come with some commune-like followers to quiz Bill Mauldin about a cartoon that pictured black babies as a sign of black fecklessness.
On this night at Ignatius, Bevel walked into the place and gasped. “Where did they get this crowd?” he asked of no one in particular. He and King and the rest were in the business of raising consciousness, crowds, and money and knew how hard it was to draw people in the numbers such as we had drawn of our public-housing householders with their concerns about protection in their homes.
After these various meetings, most of them at churches, came the marches. “End the slums” was the slogan of the season. I wore my button in front of a Roosevelt Road polling place on election day and got called out by a bald, stocky First Ward worker. “What’s that mean?” he asked, belligerent, me in my collar, both of us watched by West Side Organization worthies. I told him.
He got hot and told us to get away from the polling place. We were on the south side of Roosevelt a few blocks down from Ignatius. When I didn’t leave, he told the young Irish cop on duty to move me.
The First Ward man was wrong. We were neither too close to the polling place nor did we wear or carry political signs. But the cop was in a bind. He asked me to leave. We both knew that if I didn’t, he’d arrest me.
The ward worker had enough of a case apparently, and more important, the clout; and the young cop was not about to tell him off. He looked at me, silently pleading for me to move.
That did it: I saw no cause to put him in a situation where he arrested a priest. I moved. It was a moment of truth for the WSO men, one of whom later commented that I had backed down. It was a chance for me of the white establishment to confront the (mob-connected) First Ward, and I didn’t. A good thing, too.
FINGERED My stock rose and fell with the WSO men. On my return from Mississippi or shortly after it, I was greeted on the street by one of the regulars with a handshake as “My man.” But that didn’t last.
After our Roosevelt Road riots, a year before the Madison Street riots following King’s assassination, I stood during a meeting of our little community organization, Together One Community, in a park district meeting room in the projects and bemoaned the lack of leadership in ABLA, referring obliquely to WSO and its allies.
In our midst was a weaselly fellow in a suit who told Chester Robinson, who fingered me next time he saw me on the street. His term: he was “fingering” me, which on the street meant I was in danger. A friend told me I shouldn’t walk around without my collar and should watch where I walked.
I told Rev. Don Benedict about it at one of Jack Egan’s meetings of the IRCUA. Benedict, a WWII conscientious objector, socialist, and pacifist, had been a co-founder in 1948 of the acclaimed East Harlem Protestant Parish, and by then was executive director of the Community Renewal Society, formerly Chicago City Missionary Society, which funded WSO with Hinsdale Union Church and other white-church money.
He moved his head about in discomfort, allowing that Chester Robinson did get off base sometime, or words to that effect. There was no direct disapproval, however. Benedict and others were for self-determination and “community leadership” wherever they found it. Whether the leaders were worth supporting seemed to be moot.
More, more, more to come. Stay tuned . . .
Blithe Spirit 