From:
Thy Honored Name: A History of the College of the Holy Cross, 1843-1994
-- Anthony J. Kuzneiwski
In 1947, William Healy was the only clergyman to attend a State House hearing on a Fair Education Practice Bill. He endorsed Branch Rickey's experiment of integrating professional baseball and sought the integration of Holy Cross, writing, "No boy will ever be denied admission to Holy Cross because of his color." Ten years later, William Donaghy used the athletic program to promote equality by prohibiting competition against segregated teams. But favorable policies could not, by themselves attract qualified African-American applicants. In 1965, Father Swords reported that minority enrollment stood at twelve. Although he wanted to do more, he conceded that "some very sad [academic] experiences... cause us to be cautious -- maybe too cautious." Then, slowly, the civil rights movement altered circumstances. In 1968, about 700 students marched to a local demonstration following the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.; the following year, Holy Cross became the first large school in the country to join Project Equality, an organization that urged the boycott of businesses that discriminated against minorities....
This movement recieved a tremendous boost on Jesuit campuses in November of 1967, when Pedro Arrupe [28th Superior General of the Society of Jesus, aka the Black Pope] issued a letter on the racial crisis in the United States. Linking blacks and Hispanics together as victims of "racial injustice and grinding poverty," he pointed out that American Jesuits had a mixed record in opposing racism: "It is embarrassing to note that, up to the present, some of our institutions have effected what seems to be little more than token integration of the Negro." This weakness, Arrupe argued was connected with an erroneous view of human nature, a tendency to accept stereotypes, to be isolated from the poor, and to accept prevailing attitudes uncritically. The result was "our past failure adequately to realize, to preach, to teach, and to practice the Christian truths of interracial justice and charity, according to our Jesuit vocations." To remedy the situation, Arrupe set forth ten new policies, including renewed efforts to increase minority enrollment....
* * * * *
Father Arrupe, to a degree, was guilty of anachronism. Most Jesuit schools until recently served regional communities in the North where there were few Hispanics and blacks. Moreover, this was still an America where a serving Supreme Court Justice, Hugo Black, had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Black had made his Alabama political bones in 1921 by successfully defending E.R. Stephenson for the murder of Father James E. Colye. Colye's offense was marrying Stephenson's daughter to a colored man. Though he'd renounced the KKK, to his dying day Black was a committed anti-Catholic.
By the 1960s, however, demographics were no longer an excuse. By then the great Black migration had peaked bringing millions of African-Americans from the South to the northern cities of Chicago, Boston and New York. Jesuit schools, notably Georgetown, were establishing a national presence.
Father Arupe had been a missionary to fascist Japan where in days gone by Catholic missionaries, including members of the Society of Jesus, had been martyred by burning and beheading. At Hiroshima Father Arrupe had had the atomic bomb dropped on his head and afterwards ministered to the casualties in the ashes of the first nuclear holocaust. What Jesuit could look him in the eye and say that he was afraid of being lynched in Mississippi or Alabama... or South Boston.
