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Gulf Pine Catholic
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July 18, 2014
Gulf Pine Catholic
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July 18, 2014
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Then-Archbishop PatrickA. O’Boyle ofWashington walks with U.S. President
Lyndon B. Johnson following a 1968 Mass in Washington. The archbishop,
who was later named a cardinal, was a vocal supporter of the Civil Rights Act,
signed into law by Johnson July 2, 1964. He also integrated Catholic schools in
the Washington Archdiocese 16 years before the Civil Rights Act.
CNS file photo
Civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. talks with U.S. President
Lyndon B. Johnson. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law July 2, 1964.
CNS photo/Yoichi Okamoto, courtesy LBJ Library
Mississippi Bishop Oliver Gerow is pictured in this 1960 photo with members
of Pax Christi in Greenwood, Miss. Bishop Gerow, head of the Diocese of
Jackson, Miss., from 1924 to 1967, steered Catholics in the state through some
of the darkest days of the civil rights movement. He released a statement
urging lawmakers to support the Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed into law by
President Lyndon B. Johnson July 2 of that year.
CNS photo/courtesy Diocese of
Jackson Archives
U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act into law July 2,
1964, as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and others look on.
CNS photo/Cecil
Stoughton, courtesy LBJ Library
Reflections on Civil
Rights Act: Progress
made, work still to do
By Carol Zimmermann
Catholic News Service
WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Fifty years ago, when the Civil Rights Act was
signed into law July 2 by President Lyndon Johnson, two Louisiana-born men did
not feel the earth move, but they knew it was the beginning of a time of change.
Norman Francis, president for student affairs at Xavier University in New Or-
leans at the time, described the law’s passage as part of a “watershed year.”
After living for more than three decades “under Plessy” as he says, referring to
the Supreme Court decision upholding racial segregation and “separate but equal”
facilities, Francis said it was hard to imagine that he had graduated from law school
but still “couldn’t walk into the front door of a restaurant until 1964” when the
civil rights law prohibited racial segregation in schools, workplaces and public
facilities.
But even graduating from law school was no small matter. Francis was the first
African-American to be admitted to law school at Loyola University New Orleans
in 1952 and he is just reading now about the efforts by local priests that went into
getting him admitted.
Now, his name is almost synonymous with Xavier University, the country’s
only historically black Catholic university, where he attended as an undergraduate
and held various positions until being named president in 1968, a role he was asked
to assume on the day of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.
In an interview with
Catholic News Service
on the university’s campus June 12,
the longtime president, who is 83, showed no interest in retiring. He was quick to
praise the school, founded by St. Katharine Drexel and her Sisters of the Blessed
Sacrament, not only for its educational accomplishments but also for quickly get-
ting itself out from under 6 feet of floodwater from the breached levees following
Hurricane Katrina.
Francis, born in Lafayette, Louisiana, along with his four siblings, said the
separate-but-equal segregation “was a monster of many proportions on the human
spirit.” He also said his parents, who never graduated from high school, “had to be
the greatest psychologists in the world to have us keep our bearings while going
through this.”
They always stressed the importance of education and faith, he said, and it
seems the Francis children took this message to heart.
“We never lost our faith; our faith brought us through all of it,” he said of he
and his siblings including his brother Joseph, a priest with the Society of the Divine
Word who became one of the nation’s first black Catholic bishops.
The college president said his brother was active in the civil rights movement
along with a number of priests and nuns who took part in protests and marches and
were a “credit for the church.”
Auxiliary Bishop Joseph A. Francis of Newark, New Jersey, who died in 1997,
chaired the committee that wrote the 1979 U.S. bishops’ pastoral letter on racism,
“Brothers and Sisters to Us,”
which called racism a sin.
The bishop gave talks around the country years after the pastoral letter was is-
sued challenging Catholics not to just talk about eradicating racism but to do more
about it.
See WASHINGTON LETTER, page 15
U.S. bishops backed
Civil Rights Act, urged
people to make it work
By Carol Zimmermann
Catholic News Service
WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Catholic leaders supported the Civil Rights Act of
1964 and also urged Catholics to get behind the law to make it work, according to
the yellowed pages of typewritten articles in the
Catholic News Service
’s archive
folders.
The articles, written by
National Catholic Welfare Conference News Service
,
a predecessor of
CNS
, are headlined in all capital letters:
“Churchmen hail rights
law, urge cooperation”
and
“Churches had big part in rights bill passage.”
The reaction piece of July 3, 1964, the day after the legislation was signed into
law by President Lyndon Johnson -- and additions to the story in subsequent days
-- quotes several Catholic bishops and lay leaders rallying behind the legislation
that prohibited racial segregation in schools, workplaces and public facilities.
Los Angeles Cardinal James F. McIntyre called the law a “concrete expression
of the conscience of all men of good will” that has been the “concern and work for
the church for many long years.” And Washington Archbishop Patrick A. O’Boyle,
who integrated Catholic schools in the Washington Archdiocese 16 years before
the Civil Rights Act, described the legislation as a “tremendous national step for-
ward.”
Putting the law back in the hands of American citizens, Atlanta Archbishop
Paul J. Hallinan warned that if the civil rights law was “evaded or flaunted, both
sides will lose and Georgia and the American nation will suffer.”
Similarly, Msgr. George Higgins, director of the social action department of
the National Catholic Welfare Conference, a predecessor to the U.S. Conference
of Catholic Bishops, said the act will be “of little avail unless the great mass of
American people are prepared to go beyond the letter of the law and to help create
an atmosphere of mutual understanding and racial brotherhood in their neighbor-
hoods and communities.”
And in a joint statement issued July 3, 1964, the bishops of Louisiana urged
Catholics not just to obey the letter of the law but to “heed the voice of their con-
science in observing its spirit.” They also stressed the need to “put aside hatred,
agitation, repression and any other extremes.”
Similarly, Bishop William G. Connare of Greensburg, Pennsylvania, urged a
group of Catholic laymen to be “in the vanguard” of those making sure the law
was obeyed.
Frank Heller, president of the National Council of Catholic Men, certainly did
not need prompting about this. He said the new law put the nation “on the verge
of a ‘release from racism.’” But he also warned Americans not to let the new law
“atrophy into a meaningless gesture.”
“Future generations will live in shame if this becomes for history merely ‘one
brief shining moment’ when this nation gave witness to the dignity of all her citi-
zens,” he said.
An
NCWC News Service
story from July 2, 1964, said churches played a major
role in “tipping the scales” in favor of passage of the Civil Rights Act by actively
supporting it from the time President John F. Kennedy spoke of plans to introduce
it in 1963 and the year plus that it was debated and voted on in Congress.
See CIVIL RIGHTS-BISHOPS, page 15
