Catholic Segregation

It is axiomaticaily true that the Church of Rome moves slowly. But it has been on this earth almost 2,000 years, and it has yet to get around to doing anything serious about implementing Christ’s teachings on race and equality. It took the Catholic Bishops of the United States four years to get up ecclesiastical steam to issue a flat-out proclamation against racial segregation and discrimination after the 1954 Supreme Court desegregation decision. Then, having said it, most Bishops promptly forgot it, spiritual leaders to some 50,000,000 hypocrites—good American Catholics all, whose religion made racial discrimination a no-no, but whose priests told them yes-yes with their eyes.

This was the great sham and scandal in the Catholic Church against which Leon Aubry and his fellow black Catholics began to take up nonviolent arms and give alms against in Los Angeles. It is of interest that this uprising was mostly the work of Aubry’s people—the transplanted Southern black Catholics. The “native son” blacks who had lived longer on the West Coast accepted the tacit segregation of their Church the way the blacks had in the South.

When I met Aubry he was in hot water up to his barber chair. He had been trying for six years to get an appointment with Cardinal McIntyre to discuss his grievances, but the closest he had come was a meeting with an epicene Monsignor who suggested it had been “arranged” for Aubry and his fellow malcontents to join the Knights of Columbus. So the barber and his black Catholic allies began to picket the baronial portals of exclusive Fremont Place, a private park for the rich in Los Angeles where the Cardinal’s mansion is located. (Aubry and his group had the big black balls to sing “Holy God We Praise Thy Name,” a bouncy hymn with a Gregorian sort of rhythm, while they stalked the Cardinal.) That sort of boat-rocking, even if you were white, was entirely out of bounds in Lotusland.

McIntyre labeled these black Southerners upsetting his flock as Catholic carpetbaggers — “outside groups,” consisting of “half-whites and half-mongrels.” The Cardinal did a memorable job on these upstarts, working them over with his pectoral cross in a way that hurt like hell but didn’t leave bruises. The black families who had linked their names with Aubry’s group became the sudden objects of pastoral attention. They began to receive visits from priests and nuns ostensibly to discuss their grievances—visits which were as oppressive and intimidating as they were frequent. One visiting nun stayed for 12 hours, just sitting in the living room, a crow dressed in black, fingering her rosary beads, until the family finally asked her to leave. These black Catholics were told that what they were doing was ruining the Church for everyone, hurting their own cause, and hurting their personal standing in the community, which could have severe social, financial repercussions.

The barber ringleader got the full treatment. He had been cutting hair in the same shop in West Los Angeles for ten years, and the summer that he took up his beef with his Cardinal, he got his first citation. The inspecting civil servant said that Aubry hadn’t washed his hands properly before he went on to the next customer. Barbers usually wash their hands between haircuts about as thoroughly as surgeons did before Pasteur. The citation, and with it an implicit threat against the license which was his livelihood, came during Aubry’s second “inspection” of that summer—followed by two more “inspections” and threats of citations. Within six weeks there were as many inspectors and bureaucrats coming into his shop to give him some sort of haircut as customers.