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Gulf Pine Catholic
•
July 18, 2014
Memories of civil rights struggles still fresh in
Mississippi town
By Patricia Zapor
Catholic News Service
GREENWOOD, Miss. (CNS) -- A pane
of cracked blue glass above the front doors
of St. Francis of Assisi Church in Greenwood
helps ensure that nobody forgets how their
parish, its founding pastor and the religious
who staffed it stood up for them during a po-
larizing, often brutal time.
As this summer marks the 50th anniver-
sary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of
1964, parishioners at St. Francis have a vivid
reminder of the related events in their town.
They can look up and see where a bullet went
through the window, one of many acts of vio-
lence and serious threats to a faith commu-
nity that was active in promoting civil rights,
both behind the scenes and in the streets.
For people who lived in Greenwood at
that time, however, the broken window pane
doesn’t seem necessary to remind them what
their town has been through. In interviews
with
Catholic News Service
in early June, pa-
rishioners at St. Francis and the town’s other
Catholic church, Immaculate Heart of Mary,
spoke vividly of incidents from those years.
They lived with the blatantly racist way of life epito-
mized by the White Citizens’ Council, a Greenwood-
founded segregationist group that actively championed
the Jim Crow system. Greenwood, now with a popula-
tion of just 15,000 and then around 20,000, found itself
divided even more in the mid-1960s by a months-long
merchant boycott in protest of how blacks were treated.
A few years earlier and 10 miles up the road, Emmett
Till, the black Chicago 14-year-old who was visiting
relatives in Money, Mississippi, was found -- tortured
and killed -- reportedly for flirting with a white young
woman.
Greenwood’s residents lived through the two crimi-
nal trials of local white supremacist Byron De La Beck-
with for murdering civil rights activist Medgar Evers
in 1963. (Though those 1960s trials failed to reach ver-
dicts, he was convicted in 1994.)
And Greenwood witnessed further upheaval when
organizers from outside Mississippi zeroed in on their
town to promote voter education and voter registration,
leading to a fire being set at the offices of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the gunshot
wounding of a community organizer, even drawing
such high profile activists as singers Bob Dylan and
Pete Seeger to town.
Through all this, what was then known as St. Fran-
cis Mission, its elementary school and church-spon-
sored community center in the heart of a poor, black
neighborhood, were essential pieces of efforts by the
Catholic Church in Mississippi to provide a wide range
of services to Mississippi’s poorest residents, regardless
of religious affiliation. In Greenwood, the Franciscans
strove to provide African-Americans with a welcoming
place to worship and a school where they could get a
decent education in the deeply segregated society.
Mississippi’s Catholic population has never been
large -- it’s currently about 9 percent -- and the per-
centage of black Catholics is an even smaller fragment.
When St. Francis Mission was founded in 1950, there
were just two black Catholics in Greenwood, accord-
ing to an article on the role of Catholics in the town by
Siena College professor Paul T. Murray in the
Journal
of Mississippi History
.
Franciscan Father Nathaniel Machesky, a Detroit
native who joined the friars out of a desire to do mis-
sionary work, was initially assigned in Greenwood at
Immaculate Heart of Mary. But as Murray put it, “min-
istering to a respectable all-white congregation was not
Father Nathaniel’s idea of true missionary work.” When
the friars received permission to open a mission for Af-
rican Americans, he found a 12-acre parcel of land on
the outskirts of town and transformed the “juke joint”
on the property into a chapel.
Father Nathaniel saw offering a good education as
the key to evangelization and quickly opened a school
at the mission.
Talking over coffee in the rectory in early June, sev-
eral African-American women who’d grown up at St.
Francis, and who became Catholic because their parents
put them in school there, told
CNS
about how
far their community has come when it comes
to racial divisions.
They told long-ago stories: of being
warned to leave a CYO gathering at Immacu-
late Heart before something bad happened;
and of being told during a prayer service
there, “This church is ours. You have your
own.”
But another woman had a story from just
last year: of watching a white man in line at
the grocery store demand -- and get -- a white
cashier to ring up his order instead of the
black cashier who was already in the posi-
tion. More than one of the women voiced a
fear that “Jim Crow is coming back,” because
of the increase in apparently race-based con-
flicts around the country.
They agreed that the role of St. Francis
of Assisi Parish was important to their own
success in life, and in helping improve the
chances for Greenwood’s poor black fami-
lies, as well as helping turn the tide against
the era’s racist ways.
Another piece of the Catholic Church’s
role in Greenwood began with Kate Foote
Jordan, who founded a secular institute of religious
women they called Pax Christi. By the mid-1960s,
the group of about 20 women, including two African-
Americans, operated the St. Francis Information Center
to offer instruction in Catholicism and recreational ac-
tivities for children, according to Murray.
It eventually hosted a clinic, a grocery store, scout
troops, music lessons, a skating rink, tutoring and adult
education, and published a weekly newspaper for Afri-
can-Americans.
Father Nathaniel also created a credit union and sev-
eral small businesses for the community. He was active
in the interracial ministerial association and success-
fully worked with both blacks and whites in building
the parish of St. Francis.
His involvement in the boycott of Greenwood mer-
chants that followed the 1968 murder of Dr. Martin Lu-
ther King changed that somewhat.
As one of the priest’s friends and a lifelong Immac-
ulate Heart parishioner, Alex Malouf, tells it, Father
Nathaniel had carefully straddled the cultural chasm
between his black parishioners and the dominant white
business community, where he had friends and support-
ers.
But the support the parish had enjoyed from some of
the white-owned businesses was strained when Father
Nathaniel, the sisters who staffed the school and oth-
ers affiliated with the church joined the boycott of their
stores.
A Sister of St. Joseph of the Third Order of St. Francis is shown teaching
a class May 27, 1953, at St. Francis School in Greenwood, Miss. The
school endured attacks by segregationists in the 1950s and 1960s because
of its commitment to the African-American community.
CNS photo/Bishop
Oliver Gerow, courtesy Diocese of Jackson Archives
See CIVIL RIGHTS-GREENWOOD, page 15
