Hmmm…
Did you know that:
There are black men alive today denied admission to Notre Dame because it did not admit blacks?
There was a special auxiliary of the Klan which admitted Catholics and which attacked black demonstrators in St. Augustine in 1963?
There are priestly orders which did not admit black applicants on principle until the end of the sixties?
Cardinal Spellman urged Pope Paul XI not to meet with MLK at the urging of J. Edgar Hoover? (The pope met with him anyway.)
During the Civil War a black orphanage in NYC was set on fire by Catholic rioters, the doors nailed shut and anyone trying to get out the windows was shot?
Catholicism is color blind but I’m not sure about all Catholics always.
Beau, I am still here in your ancestor’s country. I am a native New Orleanian who has lived in the Baton Rouge area for the last 32 years. Mine was one of the first classes to be integrated (OLPH in Kenner) in 1963, The archdiocese of NO was way beyond the curve.
I am also Irish. The granaries were filled in Ireland in " Black 47" and the British government let people starve because they were Catholic. My ancestors were dumped on the levees of NO in high summer. My ancestors dug all those canals in NO because slaves were more valuable. Did you know that there is a mass grave of 5,000+ Irishmen on Pontchartrain Blvd. in NO because they died of yellow fever while digging the New Basin Canal?
Both of us can cite history. I can’t own the attitudes of the nineteenth century south or of my ancestors. It shakes me to my core that I have discovered that some of my French ancestors in St. Martinville owned and sold slaves. But as a student of history, I am more than aware that there were wealthy black and creole de coleur plantation owners along the Cane River in Natchitoches that owned slaves and formed military companies to support the Confederacy.
I can no more change the past than I can can get past living
“hand to mouth” as a state employee. I have the example of my Irish mother. In the summer of 1963, the ditches to support the sewer system in Kenner were being dug - not by machine but by black men. It was hot and humid and they had no water. My mother made a big pitcher of lemonade and brought it out to workers with glasses from our kitchen. I remember her words to this day “They are children of God”. A very courageous act on my mother’s part given the mentality of the times and, yes, it was noted by my neighbors and, yes, I did mention it at my mother’s funeral with some of the very neighbors who commented present.
For every historical event you can cite, there is an equal and opposite event for the Irish, I can cite. We have to move beyond what happened in the past. I’ll give you one more brief example.
In 1990 I took over as an Examinations Director for a state agency involved in licensing. I was the #3 person in the agency. My test monitor resigned and I asked an old friend from another state agency if she would be interested in a transfer. She was and I brought her over. The #2 person in the agency (my supervisor) said to me “You didn’t tell me she was black!” My response to her was “It didn’t occur to me that it mattered. She is qualified”.
Change is possible. It has happened. I have no animosity towards the British or my fellow Americans as a person of Irish ancestry. We have to move beyond our ancestors and what happened in the past. We can’t change the past. We can change the future.
