In Chicago, one of the strongest impetuses for improved race relations came from the Catholic Church. This had not always been the case; nor, by any means, was it universally the case in the 1950s. Many Catholics drew their identity from the local Catholic parish where they lived and worshiped; when the arrival of blacks threatened to displace them from their homes, they resisted. By the 1950s, however, there had grown up a reputable strain of progressivism within the Church’s membership, inspired by Catholic activists like Dorothy Day, among others. And given that Catholics accounted for fully 40 percent of the Chicago population during these years, and that Cardinal Stritch was himself very progressive on racial issues, allying himself with the left-wing organizer Saul Alinsky’s efforts to integrate neighborhoods, the Catholic Church had the potential to have a significant impact on race relations in postwar Chicago.
The institutional Church made little overall contribution to civil rights until late in the 1960s, but an informal network of lay people and activist priests and nuns was in the vanguard of the movement. One of the first prominent Catholics to take an active role in crusading for improved race relations was a Jesuit priest, Father John LaFarge. By 1934 the fifty-four-year-old Father LaFarge, a friend of Hilda and Robert Shriver, had pulled together a mixed-race group of about 800 Catholics in New York City to form the Catholic Interracial Council of New York. Its goals were to foster better race relations within the Church and to effect positive social change outside of it.
In Chicago, Catholic lay activism had been institutionalized under the leadership of a priest named Reymond Hillenbrand, who ran an influential seminary. In 1946 he received approval from Cardinal Stritch to found a Catholic Interracial Council (CIC) modeled after New York’s.
Archbishop Stritch officiated at the Holy Name Cathedral, where the Shrivers worshiped. Through his participation in some of the church’s social and civic projects, Sarge had become well-acquainted with the cardinal, and through him with the work of the Catholic Interracial Council.
One night in 1952, through some friends from church, Shriver met Lloyd Davis in the Pump Room. Davis, a soft-spoken young African American, had grown up next to a brothel on the South Side, where the neighborhood prostitutes taught him to be a good Christian. Although he had been raised in the African Methodist Church and nurtured in the bosom of South Side black culture (he considered Mahalia Jackson to be almost a second mother), Davis didn’t like the way local pastors often used the Methodist Church more as a political foothold than as a place for spreading the word of God. Consequently, he converted to Catholicism during the Korean War, which he spent at a fort in Missouri. Not incidentally, Davis’s time in the army coincided with President Truman’s executive order integrating the US armed forces; for a young soldier who had spent most of his life comfortably within the all-black confines of his South Side neighborhood, this was the first experience of being a minority. It wasn’t pleasant, mainly because some of the whites in his newly integrated regiment were not happy to find themselves serving cheek-by-jowl with Negroes.
While in the military Davis developed close relations with some Catholic chaplains who told him that if he was serious about his religion, he should leave the army when the war was over and join Chicago’s Catholic Interracial Council, which was looking for a black director. Davis leapt at the opportunity. He was devout in his faith, had seen the problems of interracial hostility firsthand, and moreover was active politically, having at a young age been initiated, as many young blacks were, into Congressman William Dawson’s Democratic submachine.
The overriding mission of the CIC was to eradicate “the sin of racism,” beginning by bringing racial justice into the Church itself, “to get it to clean its house up and stop being a perpetrator of racism and segregation and exclusion,” Davis recalled. “You could not deal with the larger community if the Church itself was a perpetuator of everything that you wanted to fight. And so the Catholic Interracial Council had as its first responsibility trying to make the Catholic Church embrace interracial justice as a way of life, and trying to get it to accept diversity.” The next step was “to reach out to blacks and others and reform the institutions. I mean, blacks were being turned out of schools and neighborhoods, and being refused admittance to hospital emergency rooms.”
But it was hard to find devoted Catholics willing to work toward reforming the Church from within. Thus Davis’s encounter with Shriver in the Pump Room was fortuitous. The two men talked long into the evening, and Davis had soon persuaded Sarge to accept the chairmanship of the CIC’s school committee.
Shriver was so effective as head of the school committee that he was asked to join the CIC board, and in 1955, he was elected CIC president. One of Shriver’s main goals as president was to get qualified black students into some of Chicago’s stronger Catholic high schools. None of these schools actually forbade the admission of black students in their bylaws or charters, but their high tuition costs effectively made them “whites only” schools. To combat this, Shriver got the CIC to establish a scholarship program that placed dozens of black students in fifteen Catholic high schools. As John McDermott, who succeeded Lloyd Davis as the Chicago CIC’s executive director, recalled, “Shriver’s scholarship drive had the effect of getting Negroes into schools where there had never been any before.” Catholic secondary schools in Chicago were integrated considerably earlier than their counterparts in most other cities.
THE BOARD OF EDUCATION
Shriver was able to play a particularly significant role in the desegregation of the Chicago school system because, in addition to being president of the Catholic Interracial Council, he happened to be the president of the Chicago school board. He got the school board job, he recalled, by accident. “After I married Eunice, I felt that by keeping her in the Midwest I was depriving her of all kinds of interesting activities in Washington. So I always had my eye out for opportunities for her. One day, I picked up the paper and saw there was a vacancy on the Chicago Board of Education. ‘Aha,’ I thought to myself, ‘Eunice would be perfect for that.’ ”
So, Shriver recalled, he carefully crafted a letter to Bill Twohey, a Chicago judge influential in Democratic politics, proposing Eunice for the position. But he proposed her in a somewhat elliptical way, knowing that “anything put in writing in the world of Chicago politics was dangerous because everyone would end up reading it.” So Shriver wrote something along the lines of, as he recalled it, “Bill, you and I both know someone who would be an extraordinarily competent and successful member of the board of education. The appointment of this individual would be a great credit to the mayor.” (In Chicago, the mayor directly appointed members to the board.) Shriver thought the letter was “properly circumspect but also very clear.”
Two weeks later Shriver got a call from Judge Twohey. “The board of education appointment is all set,” Twohey told him, as Shriver recalled. “Kennelly’s going to go ahead with it.”
“God, Bill, that’s wonderful,” Shriver said. “Thank you for making this happen. Eunice will be pleased.”
“Well, she should be very proud of you,” Tuohy said.
“Well, I’m proud of her. She’ll be a great asset to the board,” Shriver said.
Twohey seemed confused. “What do you mean?” he asked
Shriver repeated himself, saying that Eunice would be an asset to the board. “You did get my letter, didn’t you?” he asked.
“Of course,” Twohey said. “That’s why I’m calling. You made a very good case for yourself. The mayor is going to announce your appointment tomorrow.”
“My appointment?” Shriver said. “I was proposing my wife.”
Twohey burst into laughter. “Well, doggone it, Sarge, you should have said so. You’re the nominee now.”
So Shriver began what was to be a six-year tenure on the Chicago Board of Education. For someone who was supposed to be a trustee of the public school system, he had surprisingly little experience with public schooling—none a
t all, in fact, since his entire education had taken place at private or parochial schools, and his own children weren’t old enough yet to attend school. But on October 26, 1955, barely a year after being appointed, he was elected president of the school board, making him the senior figure in overseeing the large Chicago school system. The Chicago American editorialized, “We think the School Board made a good choice in electing Robert Sargent Shriver president.… Shriver has served on the board only since May 1954 but he has demonstrated both a devoted interest in education and an extremely intelligent grasp of the needs of the Chicago schools. He has given special attention to the development of the vocational and special education programs.… We congratulate him and the people of Chicago on his election.” The Chicago Sun-Times echoed these sentiments. This was the beginning of his never-consummated romance with Illinois state politics and his love affair with the city’s editorial columnists. “We predict that president of the school board will be only a starting point for him in public service,” the Sun-Times declared. “He is destined for even bigger things.”
“Ideas bubble from Shriver,” reported the Chicago American in 1957. In 1954, the year before he was elected president, the board had divided Chicago into sixteen districts, each with a regional superintendent. When he stepped into the presidency, Shriver seized on the district arrangement as an opportunity to experiment—just as individual states can serve as laboratories of democracy for the federal system, so the individual districts could serve as laboratories of education for the whole school system. One idea he conceived during these years was a means of dealing with difficult or delinquent youth. Wouldn’t it make sense, he asked School Superintendent Benjamin Willis, to use some of the rural or forested land outside of Chicago to build camps for delinquent students, a place where they could go to be separated from their often damaging family lives or crime-ridden cultural environments? In the woods, students could be successfully divorced from their oftentimes dismal urban surroundings, while reaping the physical and emotional benefits of an active outdoor life. Immersed in round-the-clock instruction and activity, delinquent youths might be rehabilitated.
Willis and Shriver tried to implement some small pilot programs along these lines, but they were never able to obtain the legal rights to the grounds they wanted to use. Shriver was frustrated, believing the concept to be a sound one—so he held on to the idea and put a version of it into effect nationwide ten years later as the Job Corps program, one of the cornerstones of the War on Poverty.
At Shriver’s insistent prodding, the Illinois legislature also voted a series of pay increases for teachers. When he took over the school board presidency in 1955, fourteen major cities in the nation paid their public school teachers more than Chicago did; by the time he stepped down from the school board, in 1960, Chicago’s teachers were the highest paid in the country. In a 1956 speech to the finance committee of the Chicago city council Shriver said, “As a result of the unanimous action of our board of education, Chicago’s teachers are now paid as well as or better than those in all cities with a population of 500,000 in the USA. If Chicago is to claim credit for being the first city of our nation in any respect whatsoever, I can think of none better than being America’s number one city in terms of teachers’ salaries.” In 1954, Shriver’s first year as a board member, the city spent $171.9 million on public education; by 1960, the year he stepped down, it was spending $261.8 million—yet he continued to be routinely praised by the city’s editorialists for the parsimoniousness of his budgets. And in 1956 the president of the American Association of School Administration adjudged Chicago’s school program to be “the boldest, most creative and far-reaching in the country”; in my judgment, he said, “no city in the country can top Chicago’s school leadership” of Willis and Shriver.
As president of both the school board and the Catholic Interracial Council, Shriver was ideally situated to press for school desegregation, especially after Richard Daley was elected mayor in 1955. (Shriver was a frequent visitor in Mayor Daley’s office, and the two men regularly attended White Sox games together.) Some ardent reformers rebelled at Daley’s sometimes heavy-handed political and management style. But Shriver felt he could harness Daley’s predilection for law and order and make it work toward interracial harmony.
In 1955 Chicago was still among the most racially segregated cities outside of the Deep South. Racial strife—riots, beatings, and active discrimination in jobs, housing, and hospital admissions—was widespread. But the continuing migration of blacks from the South, along with a small but growing black middle class buoyed by the continuing postwar economic prosperity, gave neighborhood demographics a dynamism that continually challenged established racial boundaries. Every week throughout much of the 1950s, three and a half blocks changed from white to Negro, as new black families arriving from the South forced existing black neighborhoods to expand into white ones.
In Chicago, as elsewhere, school systems generally followed residential patterns—children attended the local neighborhood school. Thus, once a single black student enrolled in a white school, it was technically considered “integrated.” But in the pre-Daley era, students could file for transfers to public schools outside of their residential area—so the influx of a few black students into one public school often would lead to an exodus of white students, who would transfer to an all-white school nearby. The effect was a kind of rolling segregation: As soon as one school would integrate, many of its students would simply resegregate somewhere else. Shriver prevailed on Mayor Daley to prohibit this practice. “Public high school students in Chicago now go to the high school in their district,” Shriver said in 1958; schools that got integrated now stayed integrated.
The problems of segregation and discrimination were as persistent in Chicago housing as they were in the Chicago school system. Trumbull Park, for instance, was a formerly all-white community that the city had forced to absorb twenty-five Negro families in the early 1950s. The black families were taunted, harassed, and physically abused by neighborhood whites; students and teachers at the Trumbull Park Catholic schools made life so miserable for black students that they were forced to withdraw; the community paper, the Daily Calumet, called for the removal of the black families, by force if necessary. And some of the local Catholic parishes made it clear to the new residents that blacks were not welcome to worship there. “Racial violence in Trumbull Park has become normal,” said one black leader, and retaliation by African Americans became a growing problem: “A white person takes his life in his hands if he walks through the Black Belt on the South Side at certain hours.”
At Shriver’s insistence, the Catholic Interracial Council devoted hundreds of hours to meeting with local leaders in the Trumbull Park Community and to providing support to the twenty-five black families. Shriver personally involved Cardinal Stritch in the neighborhood, and the council distributed some 25,000 pieces of literature in an attempt to lift the veil of ignorance from bigoted eyes. CIC members personally escorted black families to St. Kevin’s Church so they could attend Mass. But recalcitrant whites sought revenge on the CIC, throwing rocks through the council windows with notes attached that said, “Keep your hands off Trumbull Park or else.” For several weeks, the CIC offices had to be kept under twenty-four-hour police surveillance.
Another problem Shriver strove to address through the CIC was racial discrimination in Chicago’s hospitals, and in particular in Catholic hospitals. The number of black doctors was declining. Worse, there had been many unfortunate incidents of hospitals refusing to admit black patients, even when patients in dire need of medical attention appeared in emergency rooms. In 1955 Shriver had the CIC convene a Catholic Hospitals Conference for hospital administrators, both to alarm them by exposing the extent of discrimination prevalent in their institutions and to educate them about how to rectify the problem.
Perhaps Shriver’s greatest coup as CIC director was to get Cardinal Stritch to speak out publicly against racial discri
mination in the Church and in the surrounding society. Although Stritch was known within the Church hierarchy to hold relatively progressive views, he had never been outspoken about them in public. But at the Catholic Hospitals Conference on October 24, 1955, Stritch addressed the crowd gathered at the Sheraton Hotel and “called for an end of bias in Catholic hospitals” and said that “he expected them to not only admit persons of color but to hire them for administration, support, and staff medical positions.”
A year later, at a meeting of the CIC’s board of directors in September 1956, Cardinal Stritch made one of the boldest statements to date by a senior member of the Church hierarchy on the matter of racial discrimination. “Injustices done to Negroes,” he said, “are one of the blots in our history. It is no use trying to cover them up. We’re pleased that many people are realizing it is a blot, because as we know from our Catholic teaching, we must have admission of sin before contrition.” He praised the council for helping blacks “not in a warped spirit of condescension [that goes] slumming to the blacks” but rather that “strives to bring men together in neighborliness.”
The fruits of Shriver’s work on race and religion reverberated well beyond Chicago and continued to do so into the next decade, as the civil rights movement reached full flower. In August 1958, the Chicago CIC hosted a meeting at Loyola University for the growing number of local Catholic Interracial Councils nationwide. The meeting produced the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice (NCCIJ), officially chartered in 1960 under the directorship of Matthew Ahmann, who had worked under Shriver and Davis at the Chicago CIC. Prompted in part by the Loyola meeting, the American bishops made a dramatic statement in November 1958, in a pastoral letter titled “Discrimination and the Christian Conscience.” “The heart of the race question,” the bishops wrote, “is religious and moral.” This was the first time the Catholic hierarchy itself had framed the issue in this manner; earlier it had addressed racism (most notably in a 1943 statement by the Catholic bishops) in only political and economic terms.
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 18