September 24, 2004

Breaking barriers:
50th anniversary of integration of Catholic schools
 

Andy Telli
Tennessee Register

Today, most of them are easing into retirement after careers as teachers and nurses, scientists and soldiers.

But 50 years ago they were still children thinking of childish things – games and dating and school.

They didn’t spend much time thinking about making history, but that’s what they did.

In September 1954, four months after the landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Brown v. Board of Education case striking down school segregation, a small group of black students enrolled in two of Nashville’s four Catholic high schools making Father Ryan and Cathedral high schools the first to integrate in Tennessee.

King Hollands transferred from public school to enroll at Father Ryan as a freshman in the fall of 1954. “We understood the importance of what was going on,” he said, “but I don’t think the students …. were overwhelmed by it.”

When Richard Ordway transferred from Immaculate Mother Academy, the all-black Catholic high school in Nashville, to Father Ryan in the fall of 1954, “You didn’t look at that as history,” he said.

His parents didn’t talk to him about the historical implications of him and his classmates breaking a barrier, either, Ordway said. “They just wanted to keep us in Catholic schools.”

The Brown v. Board of Education ruling in May 1954 opened the door for Bishop William Adrian to integrate the two Nashville high schools operated by the diocese, Father Ryan for boys and Cathedral for girls. The other two Catholic high schools in Nashville at the time were St. Bernard Academy and St. Cecilia Academy, two private schools operated by the Sisters of Mercy and the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia, respectively.

In the spring of 1954, there were three Catholic schools for black students in Nashville: St. Vincent de Paul Elementary in North Nashville, which still operates today, and Holy Family Elementary School and Immaculate Mother, which were located on Lafayette Street in South Nashville where the Nashville Rescue Mission is today.

All three schools were operated by the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, the order founded by Saint Katherine Drexel dedicated to serving blacks and American Indians.

After the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, Bishop Adrian consulted with the priests of the diocese, which then included all of Tennessee, about whether to integrate Catholic schools.

“It caused some complaints and objections, but the majority of the (priests in the Nashville deanery) were in favor of integrating,” said Msgr. James Hitchcock, who was a teacher at Father Ryan in 1954 and two years later became principal.

“I told (Bishop Adrian), if you don’t integrate (when) you have the chance to do so, you might as well take the cross off the top of the church … because you’re not really doing what Jesus commanded us to do,” Hitchcock said.

Some bishops in the South, where Catholics were a small minority, were afraid that if they pushed too hard on integration, the state governments “would turn on us and make it impossible for Catholic schools to operate.”

Bishop Adrian decided to integrate only the Catholic schools in Nashville and leave the others in the rest of the state segregated for the time being.

In the summer of 1954, Bishop Adrian announced that Immaculate Mother and Holy Family would be closed, and black students would be accepted at Father Ryan and Cathedral school. The property was sold to Sears.

Charles Kinnard had attended Catholic schools his whole life, first Holy Family and then Immaculate Mother. The announcement that Immaculate Mother was to be closed came after his junior year.

“We were very sad when they said they would close the school,” said Kinnard, who retired from the Army after 21 years and who still lives in Nashville. The news that blacks would be accepted at the previously all white Catholic schools left him “sort of skeptical,” he added. “I didn’t believe it, but then, boom, it was there.”

Kinnard didn’t think about going anywhere but to a Catholic school. “Most of us, we didn’t want to go anyplace else. I know I didn’t.”

Jean Winchester Coleman of Nashville, Barbara Davis Hatfield, of Chicago, and Charmaine Hockett Turner of the Washington, D.C., area, had all gone to school together throughout their childhood, first at St. Vincent and then at Immaculate Mother.

“We had heard rumors” that Immaculate Mother would be closed, said Coleman, who now is a member of St. Pius X Parish, “but of course we just didn’t want to believe it.

When the realization hit us, all of us were devastated.”

The priests at Holy Family Parish and the Blessed Sacrament sisters at the schools told the students and their families “the school couldn’t afford to stay open,” Turner said.

But as she looks back over 50 years, she thinks there was another reason also: “The nuns and priests knew desegregation was coming. … They saw a need for desegregation.”

“Everybody went crazy,” said Hatfield, as they wondered where they would go after Immaculate Mother. In the fall of 1954, about 10 black girls were among the 115 students enrolled at Cathedral High School. Coleman, Hatfield, Turner and Sandra Craighead of Nashville all transferred from Immaculate Mother to start their junior year at Cathedral.

Coleman had gone to all-black schools her whole life and she wanted to go to one of Nashville’s public high schools for blacks rather than the all-girl Cathedral school. “But my mother said no. … That really thrilled my mother for me to go to Cathedral.”

Hollands’ mother, a teacher, and his father, a minister and evangelist, saw the diocese’s decision to integrate the schools as a great opportunity for him and his two sisters. “They recognized the limitations of segregation,” Hollands explained, and were eager for him to have an experience “that would transcend that.”

It also was an opportunity to give their son “a private school education they thought would be excellent,” Hollands said.

That was a motivation shared by the parents of all the black students who integrated Father Ryan and Cathedral.

“My mother … told me we were over there to get an education,” Hatfield said. “We weren’t over there to socialize. And if you had problems with that, you shouldn’t go.

She was more interested in my grades.”

 A Tense Situation

The reaction among white Catholics in Nashville was quite different.

“It was a very tense situation,” recalled Father Philip Breen, pastor at St. Ann Church in Nashville. He started his sophomore year at Father Ryan in the fall of 1954. “There was so much talk through the summer about what could go wrong.”

“Some people were really furious,” said Msgr. Owen Campion, who was a freshman at Father Ryan in the fall of 1954.

Msgr. Campion’s parents were afraid integrating the schools would lead to violence, he said. “If it had been put to a vote, my parents would have voted against it. … They had a very difficult time seeing it in any terms of value.”

Some of the resistance of the white Catholic community in Nashville was shaped by their status as a minority in the heavily Protestant South, which was hostile to Catholicism.

Catholics “had learned from the time they got here to keep a low profile,” said Father Breen.

Part of keeping a low profile meant Catholics were reluctant to take strong stands that differed from the general population, Msgr. Campion said.

And, Msgr. Campion added, “They would have had the general cultural attitudes most Southern whites had about race.”

“So many people, and some of the local parish priests, really tried to do everything they could to discourage letting these kids in,” Msgr. Hitchcock said. “It was a very unfortunate situation, and finally we outlasted them.”

“To say desegregation was popular in the white Catholic community would be ridiculous,” said Msgr. Campion, but in the end, the diocese had two things working to its advantage. First, he said, relations between the races in Nashville were not quite as bad as other parts of the South, and second, “the Catholic community over the years had developed such a sense of respect for the clergy … they had the feeling that, ‘We don’t like it, but we’ll go along.’”

After the announcement of the integration of the schools, Msgr. Hitchcock said, the faculty at Father Ryan received several threats and several windows were broken and cars vandalized at the school.

The faculty, which was predominantly priests, feared violent mobs would show up for the start of the school year, Msgr. Hitchcock said, “but that didn’t happen.”

Only four or five white families pulled their sons out of Father Ryan that year, Msgr. Hitchcock noted, and two returned the following year.

Father Francis Shea, Father Ryan’s principal, made a point not to talk to the press about how many blacks enrolled in the 1954-55 school year, arguing that the school didn’t have black students and white students, just Father Ryan students. But a check of the school’s annual for that year shows the school’s total enrollment of 293 included 15 blacks.

“To see black guys in the halls at Father Ryan was different,” Father Breen said. “But it wasn’t really the cause of a lot of fights or anything like that.”

Catholics’ status as minorities in Nashville probably helped avoid some of the violence the city saw three years later when Nashville’s public schools began to integrate and Hattie Cotton Elementary School was bombed, Hollands said. Because the Catholic community in Nashville was so small and relatively isolated from the larger community, the diocese’s decision to integrate Father Ryan and Cathedral was shrugged off as no threat to the social order, he explained.

 Getting Along

The black students at Father Ryan weren’t met with violence, but neither did they feel fully embraced.

“In hindsight, I think in their rush to comply with the Supreme Court decision … the authorities in the Catholic Church could have done a better job to educate the majority of the students and teachers at Father Ryan High School about the morality of integration and the immorality of racism,” said Mathew Walker, who came to Ryan in the fall of 1955 after eight years at St. Vincent.

Hostility toward the black students was “sometimes overt and sometimes covert. But we were made to know we were not welcome,” Walker said.

Walker still recalls the reaction of one of his teachers when he was the only student to solve a difficult geometry problem. “When I gave him my solution, his jaw dropped and his eyes widened and he asked me who did your homework for you,” Walker said. “It stung me right away. It wasn’t the kind of reaction a student would expect from a teacher when a student did well. …

“After the class one of the students in his anger in my showing up all the white boys picked a fight with me,” Walker added. “But I won, because one thing I learned at Father Ryan was how to fight. … You had a choice as a black student, you could either accept insults or seek redress.”

Kinnard, who spent his senior year at Ryan, didn’t experience situations like that, he said.

“I made up my mind … there wasn’t going to be any problems. I was going to get along with everybody,” Kinnard said. “When I got there, I let them know where I stood. … I let them know I wasn’t going to take this and I wasn’t going to take that.”

“I accepted people on face value when I was growing up,” Kinnard said. “You treat me well, I’ll treat you well. If you treat me bad, I didn’t treat you bad, I just didn’t associate with you.”

 Safety Within

Meanwhile, the black girls’ reception at Cathedral wasn’t quite as hostile.

“Some of them were standoffish. There were some of them that welcomed us,” Coleman remembered.

“We didn’t have any racial problems,” Hatfield said. “The only problems we had were girl problems.

“But things changed when you got on the street,” she added. “The moment you walked out the door, and got on the bus, there was segregation again.”

Coleman recalled an incident on the bus ride home. A white classmate whom had befriended her sat next to Coleman in the back of the bus. “We were really buddies,” she said.

But the bus driver pulled over to the side of the West End Avenue and demanded the white girl move to the front of the bus, Coleman said. The girl’s response was to tell the bus driver she could sit wherever she wanted.

“I don’t remember if she went or stayed,” Coleman said, she only remembers feeling angry and humiliated. “I had never run into anything like that before.”

At school the next day, the sisters called Coleman in and told her that white and black students could associate in school, but not after school, Coleman said.

She decided she didn’t want to go back to Cathedral. Her mother tried to explain how things in life were, Coleman said, but her grandfather, who was white, had been “expecting something like that.”

“My grandfather took over,” Coleman said, and in the middle of the school year she moved to Chicago to live with an aunt and attended St. Elizabeth High School, an all-black school where the principal was a former principal at Immaculate Mother in Nashville.

“I was too ashamed to talk to anyone about it,” Coleman said of the incident on the bus. “I never told any of my classmates.” She only told Barbara Davis Hatfield, her friend since childhood, about the incident this year.

“I felt like I was a coward because I didn’t stick it out,” Coleman said. “I tell (Barbara) a lot of times I feel like I let you down.”

 No Extra-curricular Activities

All the black students at Father Ryan and Cathedral more than held their own academically in their new schools. Those who had come from Immaculate Mother, Holy Family and St. Vincent give much of the credit to Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament whom they remembered fondly as tough teachers who set high standards and showered them with individual attention.

“At St. Vincent and Immaculate Mother we were like in a cocoon,” said Turner, who went on to become a teacher after graduating from Fisk University. “The nuns looked over us and taught us and let us know we were the greatest thing since peanut butter.”

But their success in the classroom wasn’t allowed to spill over into other school activities. At Father Ryan, the black students weren’t permitted to participate in any extra-curricular or social activities like sports and clubs or the school prom.

“We were never invited to any extra curricular social activities,” said Richard Ordway, who later was the first black Metro Nashville police officer to be promoted to the ranks of major and then assistant chief. “They never approached us and asked us if we wanted to go. ... You just knew you weren’t welcome.”

Hollands and Walker recall the faculty collecting money from the black students to help pay for the prom, then saying they couldn’t go.

“I thought it was very hypocritical,” Hollands said. “At the time I thought it was absolutely unforgivable.”

Msgr. Hitchcock “used to always take me for a walk to explain to me why things were the way they were,” Walker said. “He explained one day we couldn’t come to the prom. I asked how come. … He patiently tried to explain it to me, but it never made sense.

He went to great lengths to explain it … I can give him credit for that.”

Ordway said some of the faculty like Msgr. Hitchcock wanted to include the black students in school activities, but parents ran most of the activities.

“Parents were more concerned than the students about the extracurricular activities,” Msgr. Hitchcock said.

At Cathedral, the arrival of black students also complicated the question of holding a prom. The Sisters of Mercy who ran the school decided to do away with the prom and instead held a banquet at the Hermitage Hotel that the students could attend without dates.

“The banquet was nice,” Turner said. “But we knew what was going on even though we were young.”

“I think it bothered the white girls … because they wanted to have a prom,” Turner added. “I understood it. Fortunately, I had already been to a prom.”

 'It Was the Time'

The only activity the black students at Father Ryan could participate in outside of class was intramural sports, but it didn’t extend to school teams.

“I loved sports,” Kinnard said. “I wanted to play basketball. That wasn’t in the cards. That hurt me, because I expected to play.”

Several weeks before the school year started, Ordway and another black student, John Watson, showed up on the first day of football practice to try out for the Father Ryan team, he said. They worked out with the team the first day, but the second day one of the coaches “met us and said there’s no need getting dressed you wouldn’t be able to play. … We knew what the score was.”

Watson decided to go to another school, Ordway said, and never enrolled at Ryan.

The other schools in the Nashville Interscholastic League told Father Ryan officials they wouldn’t play them if they fielded teams with black players.

And some of the schools didn’t want black students in their gyms even as fans, Msgr. Hitchcock said. Father Ryan pointed out that taxpayers black and white had paid for those gyms, he added, but it took another 10 years before Ryan became the first white school in Nashville to have blacks on its teams.

“It wasn’t Ryan’s fault, it was the time,” Ordway said.

Kinnard remembers going to one of Father Ryan’s football games with the rest of the students without incident. But a trip to one of Ryan’s basketball games in his senior year didn’t go so smoothly. He took a seat among a group of white fans who didn’t say anything and were so involved in the game they barely noticed him, he said.

But one of the parents volunteering at the game, saw him and told him to move to the section of the gym reserved for blacks.

“When he made me move, oh that hurt me,” Kinnard said. After about three minutes, he left the gym. The next time he went to a Father Ryan basketball game was more than 20 years later to watch his daughter, then a star for Overton High School, play the Lady Irish.

By then the sting had lessened, and Kinnard took the opportunity to find some old classmates like Murray Lynch and catch up on old times.

Because the black students weren’t allowed to participate in extracurricular activities, they didn’t spend much time on campus when classes were over. Kinnard and Ordway would head straight to the all-black Pearl High at the end of Father Ryan’s school day.

“We were over there so much they thought we went to school there,” Ordway said.

After his junior year at Ryan, Ordway thought about transferring to Pearl for his senior year. Most of his friends, like Kinnard, had graduated and moved on.

“I wanted to play sports and I wanted other activities besides going to school and back home,” he said. “I never did really feel I was part of Ryan.”

But his mother, Ann Evelyn Kelly, wanted him to finish at Father Ryan. In the end, Ordway said, he decided his mother had “sacrificed too much” for him not to do as she wanted. “I decided to tough it out the last year.”

 Genuine Friends

For the blacks at Father Ryan and Cathedral friendships with white students were difficult in the social climate of the times.

There were black and white students who were friends, Hollands said, “but because everyone lived in such separate worlds outside the school, it was pretty much confined to school.”

“I had two or three friends that I thought were genuine,” Ordway said. Some white students would be friendly with the blacks only when no other whites were around to see it, he said.

But two who didn’t care about those kind of appearances, Ordway said, were Bob Frensley, who now is a prominent Nashville auto dealer, and Randall Wyatt, now a Davidson County criminal court judge.

While the hostility from their white classmates could sting, Hollands said, it wasn’t nearly as intense as what he and Mathew Walker experienced a few years later as Fisk University students participating in the Nashville sit-ins.

“From our perspective who went there, it felt and looked like hostility,” Hollands said. “From the longer perspective, and I can look back 50 years and I have some perspective, it was muted.”

 'Very Good Experience'

For all its flaws, the experience of integrating Father Ryan had its benefits.

“I did a lot of laughing over there,” Kinnard recalled with a smile.

“I would say it was a very good experience for me,” Hollands said. “I learned a lot about Nashville. I thought I got a very good education. I learned a lot about religion and another religion, for me that was interesting. I learned a lot about the priesthood and that part of religion that was different from the non Catholic experience.

“I thought it was very broadening in that regard,” he added.

“The education was top notch,” Walker said. “The teachers would give you home work and they would expect to give an account of yourself. The education was serious.”

He credited the diocese for having the courage to integrate the schools right after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. “The Catholic diocese deserves some credit for stepping up and integrating their schools that first year.”

“It was a real credit to the leadership of Father Frank Shea,” Father Ryan’s principal, that the integration of the school went so smoothly, Father Breen said. Father Shea later was named Bishop of Evansville, Ind.

“He was really wonderful,” Msgr. Hitchcock said of Father Shea.

The lesson Father Ryan’s faculty tried to teach their students during the integration of the school was “that all people were equal and they had the right to equal opportunity and equal respect,” Msgr. Campion said.

“Within the Catholic tradition, there was and there still is fundamentally … a desire for fairness,” Father Breen said. “And I think that’s what struck most of us.”

For the most part, Msgr. Hitchcock said, the integration of the schools “went very, very well. There were very few incidents of meanness. … It was very, very rare, thank God.”

The priests on Father Ryan’s faculty didn’t think about the integration of the school so much as a historic act, Msgr. Hitchcock said. “We knew we were breaking up something that was really wrong and not American. … We knew as Christians we needed to love our neighbors as we love ourselves and treat them as equals.”

In the end, he said, “We thought we’d only done what we should have as priests.”

In 1954, those first black students at Father Ryan and Cathedral saw themselves as any teen-ager does rather than civil rights pioneers. But from a perch 50 years away, the historical importance of what they did is clearer.

“It seems like people are now interested” in what those students did in 1954, said Barbara Davis Hatfield, who is retired in Chicago after working for the Illinois Nursing Home Service Division for 34 years. “And thank God for that.”