Breaking down barriers

Fr Kevin Hegarty

In the first week of November, 1960 the long march of Irish Catholics from Ellis Island to the White House ended. America elected John F Kennedy as its President.

The journalist and historian, William V Shannon, who later served as US Ambassador to Ireland during President Carter’s administration, analysed acutely the significance of the result:

“The election of John Fitzgerald Kennedy as the thirty-sixth President of the United States was a liberating and enlarging political act that strengthened our whole society. Since the United States is organised around the ideals of radical popular democracy, making no compromises with monarchy, state-supported churches, military castes, racial elites or hereditary establishments of any kind, the large, tacit prohibitions against Catholic citizens that had existed in the political order was a significant national weakness. In 1960 the people broke this ancient, unhealthy taboo against a Catholic in the White House and brought our practices another step closer to our ideals.”

Catholics, especially those of Irish descent, rejoiced in the result. America was a land of opportunity for Irish emigrants. They found work there but only a mixed welcome.

A white Anglo-Saxon Protestant ethos dominated American society and the highest echelons of its political system. Irish Catholics were seen as feckless, prone to political corruption and dominated by decrees from the Vatican.

Alfred E Smith in 1928, the only Catholic of Irish extraction to be a presidential candidate before Kennedy, experienced the brunt of these prejudices. He had an impressive record as an enlightened governor of New York. Yet he suffered a humiliating defeat in a campaign poisoned by religious bigotry and racial hatred.

We may be about to witness a breakthrough of more seismic proportions. If the opinion polls are a reliable barometer, Barack Obama is set to become president in the November 4 election. Colin Powell’s endorsement of Obama last weekend may be the blow from which even a doughty fighter like John McCain cannot recover.

Should Obama be elected it will be a euphoric experience for the black population of the US. It is a pity that Rosa Parks, who died three years ago this week, will not be there to experience it.

On December 1, 1955, she boarded a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. A caste system, designed to humiliate blacks, operated on the city’s buses. The first four rows of seats were reserved for whites. Blacks sat at the back. There was a middle section where blacks could sit, providing that no white person was sitting there.

Should a white person claim a seat there in the course of the journey, any blacks already sitting there were supposed to vacate their seats to spare the white passenger the indignity of proximate association with lesser beings.

Three stops into the journey a white person took a seat in the middle section where Rosa was already sitting. Three other blacks quietly gave up their seats but she stood her ground. She refused to move when ordered by the driver. Four days later she was convicted of breaking a city ordinance and acting in a disorderly manner.

Why did Rosa Parks challenge the system? Some observers sought to diminish the significance of her defiance by claiming she was merely tired after her day’s work as a seamstress.

To understand her action, however, it may be instructive to reflect on a little detail from Irish history. Edith Somerville and Violet Martin, writing together under the title of Somerville and Ross, chronicled in their novels and memoirs, the fading grandeur of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy in the late 19th century. In ‘Irish Memoirs’ Violet Martin lamented about the tenants on a Galway estate who defied their landlord, her father, by voting in 1972 for a Home Ruler.

She recalled nostalgically an old family retainer ‘whom Carlie and I used to beat with sticks till he was ‘near dead’, as he himself says proudly’. As the historian, Barbara Solow observed drily ‘eventually one supposes he stopped being proud of being beaten with sticks’.

Rosa Parks had grown tired of being beaten with the American equivalent of sticks. She had grown up under the cosh of racism. As a child, she heard the Klu-Klux-Klan march menacingly through her village at night. As the writer of her obituary in ‘The Economist’ commented, ‘what had wearied her was drinking from black-only water fountains, using black only elevators, going to the back, standing aside, being demeaned in a hundred ways. She wanted no more of it’.

Martin Luther King, a pastor at a Baptist Church in Montgomery, took up her cause. He organised a boycott of city buses that lasted for 382 days. Her case went to the Supreme Court which ruled that bus segregation was illegal. She received in 1999 the Congressional Gold Medal of Honour, the highest honour for an American civilian!

When a Boston newspaper referred to him as an Irishman, Joseph Kennedy, father of John F, replied. “I was born here. My children were born here. What the hell do I have to to be called an American?” Rosa Parks helped to change the face of US society by asking the same question.