9/20/24

 Friday, September 20, 2024

1961 African-American student James Meredith was refused enrolment for the first time to the segregated University of Mississippi

1969 John Lennon privately announced to Paul and Ringo (George was not there) that he was leaving "The Beatles" at a London business meeting

2001 In an address to a joint session of Congress, George W. Bush declared a "war on terror"

In bed at 9 after dozing on the recliner, awake at 2:07, up and about at 2:35. Lilly was sleeping in the TV room,   At 3:45, she woke up and walked past me on my recliner.  Did she even notice that I was here?      At 4:30, I noisily emptied the very full dishwasher and started cleaning up the kitchen with no sign of Lilly.  She finally showed up and I let her out.

Prednisone, day 129, 7.5 mg., day 8   Prednisone at 4:40.  Breakfast of oat cereal w/ berries at 7:45.  Morning meds and Trulicity injection  at 8:00.

Life in the Asylum; One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, About Schmidt, Bye Bye Braverman.  What I thought about at age 83 while considering the madness of what is happening in Israel, Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank now, plus Ukraine. Homo hominis lupus.  I thought of the widely-panned film that I enjoyed, Bye Bye Braverman, with its soliloquy by George Segal in the cemetery and the closing scene of Segal returning home and falling on his bed, crying.  I thought of the world as a madhouse, as in Marat/Sade and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and of Jack Nicholson as Schmidt.  I thought of David Sanger's article in this morning's NYTimes about the increased sense and awareness of vulnerability created by Israel's detonation of hundreds or thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies in Lebanon.  Is any personal or household device wirelessly connected to the internet safe from sabotage?   In this era of great scientific and technological progress, the age of Artifical Intelligence and Super Compurwea, are we not more vulnerable to harm than ever in human history?

Losing interest in journaling, in what else?  I haven't been interested in much lately, especially in thinking and writing in this journal.

Vision loss.  I'm having a terrible time reading.  My vision blurs so badly that I can't read anything.  Presbyopia?  Extreme dry eyes?

Anniversaries.  James Meredith.  American's original and abiding sin, White racism.  I didn't share a classroom or a church pew with a "colored person" until I was in college and even then, my world was overwhelmingly White.  From Wikipedia: "The [ultimate] admission of Meredith ignited the Ole Miss riot of 1962 where Meredith's life was threatened and 31,000 American servicemen were required to quell the violence – the largest ever invocation of the Insurrection Act of 1807."  From my memoir:

To white [Chicago] 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.  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 [and Italian] 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 services 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 on of his Milwaukee priests of leaving his quarters at a Catholic high school “unfit for a nigger.” [fn] 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)

It's hard to imagine a more racist environment than the one I grew up in on the South Side of Chicago in the late 1940s and 1950s.

John Lennon bailed.  Was it because of Yoko?  Or was it inevitable?

I remember Bush's "war on terror" speech.  It opened the door to all kinds of governmental abuses under the leadership of 'the three amigos,' Bush, Cheney, and Runsfeld. including the catastrophic invasion of Iraq.