Poche, Justin

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Conversations on Jesuit Higher EducationVolume 51 Article 6February 2017How Southern Jesuit Universities Handled Racismin the PastJustin PocheFollow this and additional works at: http://epublications.marquette.edu/conversationsRecommended CitationPoche, Justin (2017) "How Southern Jesuit Universities Handled Racism in the Past," Conversations on Jesuit Higher Education: Vol. 51 ,Article 6.Available at: http://epublications.marquette.edu/conversations/vol51/iss1/610 CONVERSATIONS ON JESUIT HIGHER EDUCATION                                                                                                                                          As a U.S. historian whose researchexplores racial justice, I seek tooffer students a long view of pres-ent conversations about race. See-ing the past from the vantage ofthe present, we may want to cri-tique earlier civil rights leadersand social policies as limited andinsufficient. We might also criti-cize debates about our individualand collective identities – racial,ethnic, cultural, religious, or na-tional – as diversions from a moreinclusive struggle for democraticand economic rights.       But if historical scholarshipoffers any lesson, it is to avoidcondemning or venerating in ret-rospect what ought to be seen onits own terms. As we seek to en-gage in difficult, though neces-sary, conversations about racetoday, we ought to understandthese terms – the ways people inthe past sought to make sense ofthe moral and political challengesbefore them.        Both Loyola University ofLouisiana and Spring Hill Collegein Mobile, Alabama, exemplifiedthe challenges of advancing racialjustice in the mid 20th century.While these campus communities,often at the urging of the Jesuitprovince with which they were af-filiated, provided important outletsfor confronting Jim Crow, they alsogenerated a fair amount of racism.       As early as the 1930s, for ex-ample, Spring Hill offered raciallyintegrated Saturday extension ed-ucation programs, and in 1954,well before other southern univer-sities integrated, the first full-timeAfrican-American students ar-rived. While such developmentswon praise from Martin LutherKing, Jr., in his “Letter from Birm-ingham Jail,” Loyola, which didnot integrate undergraduates until1962, experienced a more pro-tracted struggle. Located in an eliteNew Orleans neighborhood, themajority-white Loyola communitylived and performed racial injus-tice in multiple ways. Loyola’sKnights of Columbus-sponsoredfraternity held black-face minstrelshows. Major donors funded anti-civil rights talk radio out of Loy-ola’s WWL station. Even thoseJesuits who boldly confronted dis-crimination on campus faced asmuch hostility from members oftheir own Jesuit community asthey did from the national businessleaders and local Klan and Citi-zens’ Council operatives whoflooded their mailboxes.        Nevertheless, like Spring Hill,Loyola challenged barriers toracial equality. Like a number ofnorthern Jesuit schools, it spon-sored an Institute for IndustrialRelations, through which itsleader, Louis J. Twomey, S.J.,brought local workers and man-agers together to collaborate inbuilding a moral economy, includ-ing efforts at promoting racial jus-tice. Twomey also worked withthe Southern Tenant Farmer’sUnion, which was majorityAfrican-American, to expose busi-ness leaders who used racism tostoke white prejudice to maintainlow wages for their workers. Hiseffort to cultivate an economy inwhich people were collectively re-sponsible to one another, regard-less of what distinguished them,was particularly noteworthygiven that the drift of economicthought in the 1950s was towardcelebrating individualism andconsumerism.       Another Loyola Jesuit, sociol-ogist Joseph Fichter, challengedJim Crow by engaging students inHow Southern Jesuit Universities HandledRacism in the PastBy Justin Poché1Poche: How Southern Jesuit Universities Handled Racism in the PastPublished by e-Publications@Marquette, 2017                                                                                                                                                                                                               11an early form of community-based learning, sending studentsand other community volunteersto document racism within localCatholic parishes. With Twomey,he sponsored the student-ledSoutheast Regional InterracialCommission and its counterpartin the wider community, the Com-mission on Human Rights. Theseorganizations sponsored “Interra-cial Sundays” and hosted publiclectures that countered white su-premacist talking points with abalance of social data and theolog-ical teachings that emphasized theunity of all human persons.       At the same time, both of theseLoyola groups shared an abidingsense of Catholic superiority thatlimited their ability to reach out be-yond the campus community.Characteristically, one advertise-ment urged students to join themovement in order to “do some-thing for Christ and His religionwhile getting an education” (em-phasis added). At interfaith, city-wide gatherings of collegestudents, student leaders lamentedthat non-Catholic attendeesseemed immune to the Catholictheological principles that under-girded interracial efforts at Loyola.Others located the roots of segre-gationism in the teaching of 16th-century reformer Martin Lutherand an inferior Protestant mental-ity that, unlike Catholic doctrine,made religion “a purely per-sonal… subjective thing.”        By the 1960s, new federal civilrights legislation, along with theSecond Vatican Council and its af-firmative emphasis on ecumenicalengagement and social activism,fed a new wave of campus con-versations about race and sparkednew efforts to promote racial jus-tice. In this moment, campus lead-ers testified, the limiting focus onCatholic doctrine melted away asthe struggles for political and eco-nomic rights throughout the DeepSouth became vital sources ofmoral reflection and formation.Students joined other colleges inefforts to integrate local busi-nesses through boycotts and sit-ins, and Loyola studentsdemanded that the university adda section on civil rights to its re-quired ethics course.        Though much has changedsince then, such struggles can sparkreflection and caution for studentstoday. Past efforts to challenge thestructural sources of inequality atthe local level provide a history ofcollaborative efforts within whichproject-centered, community-basededucation can be understood today.Additionally, it is important to re-member that, then as now, studentsbrought questions of identity –sometimes uneasy efforts to authen-ticate or challenge their own social,cultural, and ideological inheritance– into their encounters with racialoppression. Such reflective practicewas and remains a central aspect ofJesuit higher education.        Yet as campus communitiesproceed from their contemplativeroles, they must heed the warningof one past Loyola student, wholamented that “too much talkingof principles instead of tech-niques” undermined collabora-tive efforts to advance justice bydividing people into ideologicalcamps. Today, the “too much talk-ing of principles” arguably takesthe shape of what might be calledan “outrage culture” that invitesmoralistic posturing in the placeof concrete action. As anotherLoyola veteran admonishedSpring Hill students in 1961, “Notonly will they be required topreach justice and charity, butthey will have to act it out in theirdaily activities.”        What we need today, as in thepast, is for Jesuit colleges and uni-versities to determine how theymight, as institutions, foster tech-niques and practices that con-cretely advance racial justice. Indoing so, they would be makingmore fruitful today’s difficult butnecessary conversations on race.Justin Poché is an associate profes-sor of history at the College of theHoly Cross whose research exploreshow 20th-century U.S. Catholicsengaged the problems of racism andenvironmental degradation.“To create a society in whichthe dignity of the human per-son, in whomsoever found,shall be acknowledged, re-spected, and protected.”- Fr. Louis J. Twomey S. J.2Conversations on Jesuit Higher Education, Vol. 51, Iss. 1 [2017], Art. 6http://epublications.marquette.edu/conversations/vol51/iss1/6

How Southern Jesuit Universities Handled Racism in the Past

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How Southern Jesuit Universities Handled Racism in the Past

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