Tuesday, June 3, 2025
D+188/133
1946 International Military Tribunal opened in Tokyo against 28 Japanese war criminals
1989 Beginning of the Tiananmen Square Massacre as Chinese troops opened fire on pro-democracy supporters in Beijing
2018 A dead whale was found with 17 pounds of plastic in its stomach in Thailand
In bed by 10:30, awake at 5:35, and up at 5:55. 65°, high of 78°, cloudy, rain late.
Eye drops at 7 a.m. and p.m.
New official Presidential Photo for Trump's Second Term. New official Presidential Motto: Fuck with me and I will destroy you.
Lethargy, lassitude, listlessness, languor, I sure have slowed down, mentally and physically. I looked at my journal notes from June 3 last year and June 3 the year before, and was impressed by the seriousness and mental energy that went into the writing. Two years ago, it was about affirmative action, racism, White Supremacy, and segregation. Last year, it was about Trump's thugishness, cruelty, and bloodlust, but mostly about Israel, the Palestinians, and the prescience of Yeshayahu Liebowitz. Today, and most days now, I'm sluggish, both in bodily functions and in mental functions.
This afternoon, I will return to the library a book titled Illiberal America by Steven Hahn. It's due back today and can't be renewed. I barely opened it, though this morning I took a quick look at the chapter with the heading "The "Other" Nineteen-Sixties." Most of it is about racial and political tensions in that decade following Brown v. Board and on the cusp of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, 1965, and 1968. I lived through that era and remember some of it rather vividly. The author focuses much attention on the ascendancy of Alabama governor George C. Wallace, "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever." I was reminded of our pastor at St. Leo parish, Rt. Rev. Msgr. Patrick Malloy and his battle cry, "Keep the undesirables out of our neighborhood." One particular sentence in this chapter caught my attention.
Between 1950 and 1960, the Black population of Philadelphia grew by 41%, Baltimore by 45%, Detroit by 58%, Chicago by 65%, Gary, Indiana by 72%, Los Angeles by 112%, and Milwaukee by a remarkable 187%.
I wrote about growing up in this era in my memoir, in a chapter I titled "The Undesirables."
I have been in one fist fight in my life. It happened when I was about 11 years old. A kid who lived across the street from us, whose name I have long forgotten but whom I will call “Tommy,” taunted my sister Kitty by chanting “Kitty kissed a nigger, Kitty kissed a nigger.” Emerald Avenue had been torn up for months for sewer work and at night the excavated street was guarded (in a manner of speaking) by an old black watchman whose name was Moses. Moses’ post was a shack kitty-corner from our basement apartment. On cold nights, the shack was heated by glowing briquettes of coke in a 55 gallon drum. Kitty and I became friends with Moses. He was the first black person we had known. We would sit in the shack talking with him after supper and before our mother would call us to come home. Moses always had his bible with him and he told us bible stories. He was kind and gentle and we loved him. I’m sure he loved us. When Mom would call us home, Kitty would give Moses a hug and a peck on the cheek. When Tommy the Taunter saw the leave-taking one night, he was merciless in deriding Kitty so I decked him. (“Decking” is too virile a term for the flailing and wrestling match we engaged in on the Emerald Avenue grass.) Somehow it ended, inconclusively as I recall, and I went home to explain how I got dirty and disheveled.
The “Kitty kissed a nigger” fight occurred probably sometime in 1952, when I was in 6th grade and probably a neophyte altar boy. It was hardly my introduction to racism, but it was the most personal and direct experience of it. Moses was not an abstraction or an anonymous member of a feared or disfavored group. He was an individual person with his own distinctive characteristics, characteristics that Kitty and I admired and cherished. He was a human being, a “child of God,” “made in His image and likeness,” and of course “a temple of the Holy Ghost.” To Tommy the Taunter however Moses was a ‘nigger’ and 8 year old Kitty was to be mocked for loving and kissing him.
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 Southsiders never knowing when the lid would blow off.
There were two great black migrations from the rural South to Chicago. The first was during the First World War. The War increased demand for many of Chicago’s manufactured products but also halted immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe which had provided laborers for ‘grunge work.’ Southern blacks were able to obtain employment that had been closed to them before the War. They were also able to escape the sharecropping and Jim Crow culture of the South which guaranteed them a life of economic penury, social degradation, and political powerlessness. The blacks who came to Chicago were mostly from Mississippi, as was the case in Milwaukee. Most lived in ‘the Black Belt,’ originally a strip of residential housing between Cermak Road (22nd Street) and 31st Street along south State Street. Over the years the narrow belt grew longer and wider and eventually came to comprise most of the South Side and much of the West Side. As my mother and father were growing up in St. Bernard’s parish around 65th and Stewart Streets, the northern border of the Black Belt was just south of their neighborhood, at 63rd and State Streets. After the horrendous Riot of 1919, race relations were relatively calm in Chicago. As my father told, me, “They stayed out of our neighborhood and we stayed out of theirs.”
Blacks were hardly welcomed by most white Chicagoans, especially the working class. The blacks were sometimes used as strikebreakers, notably in the packinghouses around the huge Union Stockyards. Even without the tremendous tensions between management and labor, involving communists, socialists, anarchists, and ‘Wobblies’ or International Workers of the World, the blacks were filling jobs that Irishmen, Germans, Bohemians, Italians and Poles and other ethnics wanted for themselves. After the War ended, between July 27th and August 3rd of 1919, there was a race riot, specifically a riot of whites, that resulted in the deaths of 23 blacks and 15 whites and in injuries to 342 blacks and 195 whites. It took the Illinois National Guard to quell the riot. The riot started when a black teenager crossed the invisible line between “white area” and “colored area” at the 29th Street beach. Forty-two years later, in 1961, there was another violent racial confrontation on the beach that the Clausen and Cummings kids used, Rainbow Beach between 70th and 79th Streets.
The second great migration occurred during and after the Second World War. Again, industrial demand for labor was high and with 16,000,000 men in the armed services the labor supply was low. Many blacks filled the gap. When the war ended, a number of factors came into play to increase racial conflict. First, the return of the veterans meant competition for available jobs was intense. Blacks didn’t want to give up the employment gains they had made and whites wanted to return to the status quo ante bellum. Second, there was a tremendous shortage of housing. Third, in the 1940’s, the mechanical cotton picker became prevalent in the South, making life even harder for poor rural blacks. This led to continued black migration into northern cities creating even greater pressure for housing and greater competition for employment. This all occurred in a city that was intensely ethnic and parochial. Hence the metaphors of ‘cauldron’ and ‘pressure cooker.’ This was the setting for Monsignor Malloy’s exhortations from the pulpit to “keep out the undesirables.”
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 were clustered around St. Leo parish and St. Sabina parish 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 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. 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 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
In fact, black Catholics were not welcome in the other churches in the diocese and their children could not be enrolled in the parochial schools. Thus, any Catholic who was black had to belong to St. Monica’s if he or she wanted to have full membership in a Catholic parish. So saith Cardinal Mundelein.
I think it is a fair guess that a majority of the white diocesan priests and members of religious orders in mid-century Chicago were also racist. It was hard not to be racist in the circumstances that existed. Racial fear and loathing were in the air we breathed and the water we drank. It was everywhere. Monsignor Malloy was not risking disapprobation when he rallied the parishioners around the “keep out the undesirables” flag, he was only preaching to the choir. Personal racism and institutional racism reinforced each other.
How did all this affect me?
First, it was scary. We learned to be afraid of black people generally and we were afraid of the intense emotions that racial issues called forth from whites. Usually, the closest we got to blacks was riding the “L” through slum neighborhoods on the way downtown. The view from the “L” was the back porches of overcrowded, badly maintained duplexes and triplexes and larger apartment buildings with bedding or newspapers in the windows and trash strewn about the back yards. We were scared of blacks who looked different, talked different and seemed to be from another planet. We were scared of whites who harbored such hostility towards blacks and freely expressed it in front of children. I don’t recall my mother ever badmouthing blacks but my father did on occasion. Despite my father’s infrequent intemperate lapses, my overall recollection is that both my parents urged Kitty and me not to harbor hostile feelings towards blacks who were, as my mother reminded us, children of God just like us.
Second, it was confusing. The organized racism came from the pulpit of St. Leo Church. The message of segregation was delivered not by a Klansman in hooded sheets in front of a burning cross but by a Catholic priest in brocaded vestments in front of an altar and crucifix. What did this suggest about the relationship between the “undesirables” and the Undesirable on the cross? What was “undesirable” about our kind and gentle friend Moses, alone each night in the guard shack reading his Bible in a neighborhood where he was simply “a nigger”? What was a Catholic child to make of this?
When I graduated from St. Leo Grammar School in 1955 and moved on to Leo High School, Catholic schools were still very much segregated. The only Catholic high school for blacks was St. Elizabeth, which had succeeded St. Monica as quasi-official black parish in Chicago. We had boys of many ethnicities at the school but no blacks. I daresay that those of us who thought about such things thought that the legal segregation of whites and blacks in the South was a bad thing, but most of us were more than content to tolerate the de facto segregation by housing patterns in Chicago and other northern cities. Our only contact with black Catholics was when Leo High School played St. Elizabeth’s basketball team, usually a powerhouse in the Catholic League. The black St. Elizabeth fans sat on one side of the gym and we sat on the other side. They had girls as cheerleaders because St. Elizabeth was a co-ed school, the only co-ed Catholic high school in the archdiocese to my knowledge. Making the school co-ed saved the Cardinal the expense of supporting two schools for blacks. Thus the black Catholic adolescents got to go to school together, occasions of sin be damned, while white boys and girls were kept in separate educational enclaves lest they be occasions of sin for one another.
I will write more about segregation and integration and the civil rights movement when I tell of your mother’s and my move back to Milwaukee after I was discharged from the Marines. The point I make in this letter is simply that the Catholic Church that I grew up in took almost no leadership role in the turbulent race relations in Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s. I think it is accurate to say that the role the Church played was much like that of a large property owner, concerned mainly with loss of property value and revenue streams. Justice was rarely the concern of the Church; rather, it was net worth and cash flow. So much for “the brotherhood of Man under the Fatherhood of God.’’ When push came to shove in Chicago’s race situation, as far as the Church was concerned, it was about money, property, wealth. I recalled this as I watched, in unspeakable disgust, the sordid scandal of priestly pedophilia and unforgivable cover-up by the bishops. For those guys, business is business and their first duty was to protect and maximize their assets, justice and the ‘docile flock’ be damned.
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