Fighting Racism

When I first came to Philadelphia over 50 years ago (1957) I became curious about W.E.B. Dubois‘ "The Philadelphia Negro“ (1898). I wrongly believed that it was his Ph.D. dissertation as the first black doctoral candidate at Harvard. I discovered only last month in Michael B. Katz and Thomas Sugrue’s “W.E.B.Dubois” (Penn, 1998) that he wrote it on the Suppression of the black slave trade. Michael C. Long’s new book, "Marshalling Justice: The Early Civil Right Letters of Thurgood Marshall, 1936-57,” started me thinking. The first black Chief Justice spent considerable time puzzling over many letters from illiterate blacks with problems of justice. Dubois, the “Talented Tenth”thinker, was not nearly as demotic.

Indeed he often seemed more interested in the small black elite in Philly. Understandably enough his Harvard supervisor, a distinguished enough scholar, was no firebrand about black American liberation. And the new Wharton School(and recently moved from the poor black part of town) gave him no academic status as he began his two year sociological study with his newly married wife at his side. Strangely enough, a Sarah P. Wharton, member of the elite Philly family was considerately more helpful: she had organized a sort of Hull House for poor black aid with the help of Seven Sister college graduates decades before Dubois arrived on his scholarly mission. This irony puzzled me who had long regarded the founder of the NAACP and “Crisis” magazine as one of great American intellectual heroes. Perhaps his subsequent scholarly studies in Germany broadened his humanism. It began to explain to me his ultimate abandonment of America in his final Third World phase.

In any case, my moderate tactics of racial liberation began slowly, cautiously as I’m a timid agitator! I’ve never had a fist fight in my life. (A little enforced boxing in the U.S. Navy.) There were no blacks on Mendota Avenue on my first Detroit residence. Nor none during my ten year tenure as teacher’s pet at Holy Rosary Academy in Bay City, Michigan. (I must have seen my first blacks as porters for the Michigan Central RR that took me to boarding school.) No blacks at Sacred Heart Seminary for almost three years there. The rector kicked me out over Easter, allegedly for getting caught in the Gothic tower-- for smoking after midnight! Though my co-fag Jim van Slambrouck stayed put.

I think it was because I was bugging teachers, especially Latin teacher Father George. I was simultaneously his best student and worst pain in his Crucifix. (It was the beginning evidence of my bi-polar disorder.) Edwin Denby High was allegedly the whore house of Detroit high schools, but I never played in my semi-celibate innocence. No Niggers there, but stupidly racist palaver. I took the hard courses (graduated 2nd in a class of 432!) thus and became friends with the stars of the football team who all turned out to be distinguished professionals: doctors, lawyers, dentists, auto execs.

But one Gil Kamen merely aspired to become a jazz drummer so we cut school often to get the cheap afternoon seats at the Paradise Theatre, where after suffering through the longuers of vaudevillian Pegleg Bates and boring western movies we were treated to the likes of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Jimmy Lunceford, and Earl “Fatha” Hines.No less an ear than Pablo Casals claimed that Paradise had the best acoustics in America, an esthetic detail that did not yet interest me or Gil! The die was cast: Black was already Beautiful to me at 16. When I went back to Detroit to bury my mother in 1982, I was in a sentimental mood. So I visited the shutdown Paradise. (Rock music had killed it.) A historical plaque summed it up: The Paradise had been Symphony Hall, but blacks flooding “Paradise Valley” around Woodward Avenue to get World War II defense jobs prodded the Grosse Pointe elite to cut and run, to create a new Symphony Hall along the Detroit River.

My U.S. Navy experience in the American South upped my anti-racist ante: three months in Gulfport,Mississippi, six in Corpus Christi ,Texas and thirteen in Pensacola, Florida mixed me with crackers and blacks often enough to resent the unearned superiorities of the former. I even often got hassled for sitting in the back of the bus where I wasn’t supposed to be. (I saw more from there!) So when I entered the Jesuit University of Detroit in 1946, I was ready to rumble (quietly!) I joined the Catholic Interracial Council to palaver with Catholic high school students in integrating neighborhood.

And was I was lucky enough to take sociology from Father John Coogan, S.J. who was the anti-semite radio ranter, Father Coughlin’s greatest debater. I did a term paper for him on the newly published “Ebony”. I slyly observed the patent contradictions between its editorial policy of Black Pride and it advertisements for hair straighteners! He loved it, gave me an “A” and pleaded with me to become a sociological major. My American Lit professor, C. Carroll Hollis, had already persuaded me to take a Ph.D. in American Studies at Western Reserve in Cleveland.

But I did please Coogan by winning the 1949 Midwest Jesuit Province Essay First Prize with “Needed: More Red-Blooded American Catholics” by which I meant more who thought like Commies (and Pope Benedict XV) on matters of Social Justice. (I also integrated the Senior Prom for the first time by double-dating with a black couple. I’m ashamed to say I can’t remember their names. But then I’ve forgotten my date’s as well. She was a beautiful blonde I do recall. And I got a a lot of grumbles at the two-sided urinals at Eastwood Gardens, where my treachery was undertaken.)