There is neither Jew nor Greek: there is neither bond nor free: there is neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus.
-- Galatians 3:28, James Healy, Bishop of Portland
-- Galatians 3:28, James Healy, Bishop of Portland
I allow for the folly of youth as much as anyone, but after all these years can’t we have honest discussion of who behaved badly at Holy Cross College in 1969 during what the Worcester Telegram calls “tumultuous days of integration at Holy Cross.”
Fraternity, a recent book about those days elevates the Jesuit priest, Father Brooks, who brought Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and prominent attorney Ted Wells to the college, to the status of civil rights hero. This is done at the expense of the Holy Cross community at the time by portraying it as hostile to Brooks and his young black proteges. Coverage of the book carelessly claims that Brooks integrated New England's first Catholic college.
First of all, Father Brooks did not integrate Holy Cross. It was never segregated in the first place. There were already black students at the College when Thomas and Wells arrived there. Indeed the college’s first valedictorian in 1847 was James Healy, a slave according to the laws of Georgia. His mixed ancestry was well known to his church mentors and the congregations he served in Boston and Maine as a Catholic priest and bishop.
Moreover, the school’s “white” student body was remarkably diverse compared to its "elite" New England, still predominantly Anglo-Saxon Protestant, cousins. Most of the Holy Cross students were the children of German, Irish, Italian, and French immigrants, but some of us had roots in Latin America, Asia and the Middle East. Remarkably thanks to the infinite wisdom of the U.S. Census, my family is now Hispanic. The school was founded in Worcester because Boston's city fathers did not want a Catholic school after the Ursuline Convent in Boston had be burned down by a mob in the 1830s.
There was little heroic about the work of Father Brooks, though it may have been difficult and saintly at times. Holy Cross wasn’t Birmingham, Alabama. Worcester wasn’t South Boston. This was the Holy Cross of Michael Harrington (The Other America), Philip Berrigan (Josephite Father and peace activist), Joseph Califano (LBJ's special assistant for domestic policy), and David I. Walsh (the Massachusetts Governor and Senator who denounced The Birth of a Nation and demanded that the Democrats explicitly renounce the KKK in their 1924 platform).
Thomas and Wells never encountered someone barring the schoolhouse door. No rocks were thrown at little or big kids arriving at the college by bus or any other means. Father Brooks wasn’t the only Christian in the Holy Cross community. Most of the Holy Cross students were children of devout Catholic families, like the saintly and kind parents of Worcester prosecutor Lawrence Murphy, who truly lived their faith. The majority of the college’s students, faculty and administration, if not the vast majority, supported what Father Brooks did. He may not have opened the door to Holy Cross, but he did actively invite people in, setting a needed example for everyone, including our "elite" New England cousins.
As far as the tumultuous days go, things would have been far less so, if a few student activists including the Black Student Union’s resident provocateur had been less confrontational. I remember very vividly, for example, having my ancestors gratuitously denounced by this young man [as an amused Ted Wells looked on] for what they’d done to his people. I am still puzzled about what ancestor of mine he had in mine. My great uncle who spent three years in a British prison for being a captain in the old Irish Republican Army? My grandfather who persuaded Bob Wagner to run for the U.S. Senate and helped elect him? Remember Wagner, father of Social Security and the National Labor Relations Act? Wagner also helped Walter White with the NAACP’s anti-lynching campaign and giving the Tuskegee airmen an opportunity to fly. I didn’t need a pat on my back for the good deeds of my grandfather and his friends, but at least before denouncing them someone ought to have asked who they were.
If the Holy Cross administration made some mistakes by allegedly disproportionately punishing blacks among student demonstrators in 1969, the administration got a lot of help making those mistakes from some very smart young black and white activists who did a very good job maneuvering the College into a situation where it looked bad. At long last it would be some consolation to hear at least a little remorse from those who damaged careers and a college’s reputation with their juvenile behavior.
