Wednesday, September 3, 2025
D+302/227/-1235
1965 Pope Paul VI published the encyclical Mysterium Fidei
1967 Nguyễn Văn Thiệu was elected President of South Vietnam under a new constitution
1978 Pope John Paul I was officially installed as the 263rd supreme pontiff
2017 1.4 ton WWII bomb defused in Frankfurt, Germany with 60,000 people evacuated, the largest postwar
In bed at 9:45. up at 5:43. 62°, high of 68°, rain much of the morning, windy.
Meds, etc. Morning meds at 9 a.m. (Again at 11:45, after refilling pill boxes.😢😡😠😟)
Urban violent crime rates. I give Trump credit for shining a spotlight on the reality of violent crime rates in American cities. Even if he loses in court his push to have National Guard and militry troops patrolling our (Democratic) cities, he will win politically with the voting (and non-voting) public and the Democrats who oppose him on this issue will look like they are tolerant of horrendous violent crimes, as I suppose they and most Republicans are, because of the racial dimension of the situation. In Chicago Mayor Johnson says crime is down some 30%, but it’s still one of America’s most crime-ridden cities, especially in poor, i.e., mostly Black but also Hispancic, neighborhoods. Eight were killed last weekend alone. In 2024 there were 573 murders, the most in the country for the 13th year in a row. The numbers are appallingly high in a great many American cities:
Chicago, IL - 573 homicides
New York, NY - 377 homicides
Houston, TX - 322 homicides
Philadelphia, PA - 269 homicides
Los Angeles, CA - 259 homicides
For homicide rates per 100,000 residents, the top cities were:
St. Louis, MO - 52.9 homicides per 100,000
Memphis, TN - 38.0 homicides per 100,000
Baltimore, MD - 35.6 homicides per 100,000
New Orleans, LA - 34.1 homicides per 100,000
Detroit, MI - 32.1 homicides per 100,000
In 2024, Milwaukee recorded 132 homicides, according to data from the Milwaukee Police Department. For homicide rates per 100,000 residents, Milwaukee had a rate of 22.86 in 2024, based on a population of approximately 577, 222. While Milwaukee does not appear in the top tier of either list, its homicide rate is still notably higher than the average for the rest of Wisconsin, which has a five-year average rate of 2.17 per 100,000 outside Milwaukee. Notably, the city has a large Black population while the rest of state is mostly White. The city’s 2024 homicide total of 132 represents a 23% decrease from 172 in 2023, showing a significant decline but still elevated compared to pre-pandemic levels (97 homicides in 2019).
Back to Chicago, Trump's next target for troop deployment: I asked Grok for the racial breakdown on gun crimes in Chicago and the numbers are quite consistent both for victims and for arrests, about 80% Blacks, about 15% Hispanics, and less than 5% Whites and "others." Violent crime in American cities, especially gun crimes, is overwhelmingly a Black phenomenon, both in terms of perpetrators and in terms of victims. Secondarily, it is an Hispanic phenomenon. As has long been true, racial crime rates correspond closely with racial poverty and unemployment rates. In Chicago, Blacks make up about 28% of the population, but 46% of those in poverty. Hispanics make up about 29% of the population, but with a poverty rate of 14.8%, about 43% higher than the White rate. Whites comprise only 32% of the population with a poverty rate of 10%. Poverty is concentrated on the South and West side neighborhoods where rates can exceed 40% in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods like Englewood, where my parents, my sister, and I grew up, and Riverdale, where my parents and my sister Kitty owned their first homes.
I mention this out of frustration over our country's inability or unwillingness to be honest about Race in America. I don't have the wherewithal to get into it today, or perhaps on any other day anymore, but I expect an explosion on of these days if Trump keeps sending troops into our cities. I can't predict what will trigger it, but something will. I wonder whether Trump and his people are hoping for it to happen to provide him with his Reichstag fire moment.
I include some Chicago history from my memoir, not only because it has some relevance to Chicago's "American carnage," but also because I have often wished I could put the entire memoir online, to have it more accessible, even though the only one who wants to read it is me :
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.
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 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)
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 Englewood “L” through slum neighborhoods on the way downtown. The view from the “L” was the back porches and yards 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. They looked different, talked different and seemed to be from another planet. We were scared of whites who harbored deep 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 to many residents 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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