Friday, July 12, 2024
1804 Alexander Hamilton dies after being shot in a pistol duel by Aaron Burr
1951 Mob tries to keep black family from moving into all-white Cicero, Illinois
1966 Start of 3 day race riot in Chicago, looting brings out National Guardsmen
1967 Race riot in Newark, New Jersey, 26 killed, 1,500 injured & over 1,000 arrested
In bed at 9 and up at 4 with lower back ache. Lilly came out at 4:55 to be let out. When I stood up, I had considerable pain in my right hip, a new pain making it painful to stand and walk.
Prednisone, day 61, 10 mg., day 4. I took my pill at 5, had CBH and eggs at 5:35, and injected Trulicity 1.5 at 5:45.
I'm grateful for the almost 7 hours of sleep I had last night.
Biden’s Heartbreaking Press Conference: His Pathos Should Not Become America’s Tragedy, by David Frum in this morning's The Atlantic online.
. . . What was left was an implicit reproach, a put-down of the downballot politician’s egotism in a top-of-the-ballot race. There was not much “you” and not much “us” in this press conference, but there was a lot of “I”: things I wanted to do, things I’d be disappointed not to finish. . . the messiah bug seems to have bitten Biden, of all unlikely victims.
As I watched this good man summoning all the power of his will against the weakening of his body, two Broadway songs came to mind. One from the musical Evita:
But on the other hand, she’s slowing down
She’s lost a little of that magic drive.
But I would not advise those critics present to derive
Any satisfaction from her fading star.
She’s the one who’s kept us where we are.
And the other from Hamilton:
If I say goodbye, the nation learns to move on
It outlives me when I’m gone.
If Biden loses to Trump, the nation Biden believed in does not outlive him. A different America replaces it, one where the presidency can be contested by violence, with judicially conferred immunity for an attempted seizure of power. Collective security will be junked, with American military power at risk of being hired by whichever dictators pay bribes to the president and his family.
That last paragraph terrifies me. It terrifies me that while Biden is vainly trying to hold on to power and to his own dwindling sense of autonomy, agency, and identity, Viktor Orban was at Mar-a-Lago carrying messages back and forth between Putin and Trump. That the miscreants of the Heritage Foundation were preparing to implement Project 2025, that Trump loyalists in and out of government offices are preparing to do whatever is necessary to guarantee that the outcome of the November election will favor Trump. regardless of the votes.
The last paragraph also infuriates me that it is Joe Biden who has placed the nation in this peril by his selfish decision to seek a second term. I find it impossible to believe all the declarations of "love" for Biden, who like Trump is another selfish narcissist out mainly for himself.
Anniversary thoughts. First, in 1804 political enemies challenged each other to a deadly duel. Today, Trump and Biden challenge each other to a round of golf.
Second, I remember hearing news reports of the White race riot in Cicero in 1951 as I was approaching my 10th birthday. I am reminded of my judgment that White racism was in the air I breathed and the water I drank growing up in Chicago in the 1940s and 50s. There was a similar riot when a Black family tried to move into Visitation Parish, where my sister Kitty attended "Vis" high school. The pastor of our own St. Leo Parish preached at Sunday masses to "keep the undesirables out" of the parish, i.e., don't sell to Blacks or to blockbusting real estate brokers. We were afraid of Blacks who were foreign to us, aliens. They looked different and they talked differently. They came from Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas, terra incognita. Their music was different and much of it sounded like shouting and screaming to us, especially in their places of worship which were usually in storefronts instead of custom-built edifices. We were Catholics and our services and hymns were in Latin and we knew nothing of Black Catholics.
From my memoir:
I mentioned in the last letter that the Church Kitty and I grew up in was racist, and so it was. It would paint a more accurate picture, however, to acknowledge that the world we grew up in was racist and the Church reflected that world. Chicago was a racial cauldron the entire time I lived there, especially on the South Side. Perhaps the more accurate metaphor would be ‘pressure cooker,’ with us South siders never knowing when the lid would blow off.
In 1960 and before, Auburn Gresham had a population of almost 60,000: 98.7% white and 0.2% black.. In 1990, the population was still just under 60,000 but with the demographics reversed: 98.7% black, 1.1% white. In 2000, the population had dropped to 55,928: 99.4% black, 0.5% white. Just to the north and east of Auburn Gresham was Englewood, my parents’ old neighborhood. A look at the demographics of Englewood provides a good picture of the racial pressures on Auburn Gresham as the Black Belt expanded. In 1930, Englewood had a population of 89,063: 98.7% white, 1.1% black. In 1940, the population was 2% black and in 1950, 11% black. By 1960, the population had grown to 97,595: 30% white, 70% black. In 1970, the population was 96% black and in 1990, the population had dropped to 48,434: 99% black.. By 2000, the population had dropped to 40,222, still virtually all black. The Wikipedia entry for Englewood is “a vacant town with buildings falling apart and 43% of the residents living below the poverty line. Over 700 murders have occurred there in just 10 years.”
The Catholics in the Auburn Gresham district belonged to St. Leo parish and St. Sabina parish, just west of St. Leo. The two churches were only ¾ of a mile apart; Mapquest’s estimated traveling time is 3 minutes. Yet the number of Catholics in that neighborhood was ample enough to support two thriving parishes each offering at least 4 Sunday masses, often standing room only (unless Monsignor Malloy was cramming the pews.) St. Leo had Sunday mass in the church every hour on the hour till noon and every hour on the half hour in the high school chapel.
To white Southsiders, the expanding Black Belt was a metastasizing cancer. When blacks moved in, whites moved out. There were efforts to foster integration, but they all eventually failed, usually quickly. A neighborhood was going to be either black or white, never both, at least not for long. One black family moving in was like one cancer cell taking up residence in an organ. Hence Monsignor Malloy’s crusade to “keep out the undesirables.” What he saw coming was his entire parish of urban Irish and German Catholics evacuating, being displaced by poor rural Mississippi blacks almost none of whom were Catholic.
What Malloy saw looming at the parish level, Cardinal Stritch saw at the archdiocesan level. Catholics in the path of black expansion were abandoning their parishes by the thousands, leaving Catholic churches and schools struggling to keep their heads above water in a tidal wave of black Baptists, African Methodist Episcopals, Church of God in Christ folks, and assorted evangelicals, pentecostals and ‘holy rollers’ of all sorts. Storefront churches popped up like dandelions, with self-appointed pastors renting spaces formerly occupied by small white retail and service establishments. This presented Stritch with many challenges. What to do about the old churches and schools and rectories and convents and devalued real estate in the newly black neighborhoods? Support them out of archdiocesan funds or close them? How to deal with the need for new churches and schools, etc. in the white-flight suburbs? How to deal with the black pressure to integrate Catholic parishes, their churches and schools and Catholic hospitals and other charities in light of deep-seated white resistance? “Keep out the undesirables” or work toward integration?
While Kitty and I attended St. Leo Grammar School there were no black students enrolled. There were no black students at Leo High School during my days there, nor at Visitation High School during Kitty’s stay there. In fact, Visitation parish, centered at Garfield Boulevard (55th Street) and Halsted Street, was notorious for the efforts of its parishioners, supported by its pastor, to keep blacks out of the parish. The Garfield Boulevard Improvement Association, which met in the parish hall, was a Chicago version of the White Citizens’ Councils in the deep South: dedicated to preserving segregation, especially in housing, churches, and schools. In 1949, when I was 8 years old, there was a riot in Visitation parish when a black couple visited the home of a Jewish couple who lived in the parish. Rumors spread that the blacks were about to move into the parish and mobs of whites, many and probably most of them Catholics, attacked the home of the Jewish couple. Worse riots by whites occurred in Cicero in 1951, again with working class Catholics leading the way. An article in the Jesuit magazine America said the rioters wore “sweaters with [Catholic ] school names or crests on the back, Knights of Columbus lapel pins and rings, scapulars or other medals seen through an open shirt . . . some fairly definite physical symbols of Catholic faith.”
Cardinal Stritch himself was a Southern racist. He believed in converting blacks to Catholicism, but not in living near them, going to school with them, or worshipping in the same pews with them. Steven Avella, a history professor at Marquette published a history of the Chicago archdiocese under Cardinals Stritch and his successor Albert Meyer. Regarding the racial tensions in the archdiocese, he wrote:
Cardinal Stritch was least well-equipped temperamentally and philosophically to deal with this aspect of change in Chicago Catholic life. Stritch was indelibly southern in his attitudes on racial issues. He displayed this in private conversation, when he would refer to blacks as “niggers.” Once, he accused one of his Milwaukee priests of leaving his quarters at a Catholic high school “unfit for a nigger.” Chancery official and later Bishop Cletus F. O’Donnell was once ordered by Stritch to “give this nigger a good tip” in reference to a railroad porter who had carried the archbishop’s luggage on board a train. In a letter to his chief theological adviser, Stritch wrote from Hobe Sound, Florida: “Do not choose the winter climate of Florida if you have some deep thinking to do. Here you take on the habits of the colored folk and do as little as is consistent with being alive. (This Confident Church: Catholic Leadership and Life in Chicago, 1940-1965.)
Stritch did not introduce institutional racism to the Chicago Church. His predecessor, George Cardinal Mundelein, set the archdiocese’s race policy within a year after becoming Chicago’s third archbishop. There was one black parish in Chicago in 1916 when he became archbishop, St. Monica’s. In 1917, he decreed:
I desire St. Monica’s to be reserved entirely for the colored Catholics of Chicago and particularly of the South Side . . . It is, of course, understood that I have no intention of excluding colored Catholics from any of the other churches in the diocese, and particularly if they live in another part of the city, but simply excluding from St. Monica’s all but the colored Catholics. (Edward Kantowicz, Corporation Sole)
This was the world I grew up in, filled with racial fear and hostility, supported by Christian churches.
The 1966 riot was a Black riot, unlike the 1951 White riot in Cicero. It started, as so many have, as a reaction to a police arrest of a Black man wanted for armed robbery. It devolved into widespread looting and attacks on police officers. From Wikipedia:
By July 15, 1,500 National Guardsmen had been deployed to patrol a 140-block area of the West Side and calm returned to the West Side, though looting and fires continued to be reported. The troops had been given orders to shoot. Over 30 people were injured during the riots, including six firemen and six policemen who had been shot. Two civilians, a pregnant 14-year-old and 28-year-old man, were killed by stray bullets from shootouts between police and snipers.[5] More than 200 people were arrested on July 14 alone.
This happened when I was in Vietnam. I heard about it on Armed Forces Radio and read about it in newspapers sent from the States. While I was personally involved in the years-long campaign of dropping more than 7.5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—double the amount dropped on Europe and Asia during World War II, our fellow Americans were rioting in our cities over the racist and unjust society in which they lived. No wonder we officers drank so much and so many troops used so many drugs in Vietnam.
I included the 1967 riot in Newark, N. J. because it was so deadly and it occurred a month after my discharge from the Marines, while I was still in culture shock about my return to the States, numbed by what had happened in my life and in the world, where things would only get more explosive the following year.
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