Catholic Whiteness and the Civil Rights Movement

How the Urban Parish Constructed Twentieth-Century Whiteness

In 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. led a march through a neighborhood called Gage Park. King and other marchers were met with such fury that the stunned King declared he’d “never seen anything so hostile and so hateful” throughout his career as a civil rights leader.¹ One would be forgiven for thinking Gage Park was a suburb of Birmingham or Atlanta instead of Chicago. 

In a previous essay, I argued that the New Deal’s uneven democratization of homeownership sowed the collapse of the New Deal Democratic coalition by pitting a propertied white working-class located in the suburbs against a propertyless black working-class located in the inner-cities. One of the central thrusts of the postwar Civil Rights movement was black professionals and tradesmen’s demands for access to better housing and the abolition of the ghetto in which they were sequestered. Many whites throughout the fifties and sixties met these demands with violence and terror.

However, white reaction to the Civil Rights movement differed in meaningful ways throughout the north and south. Historical accounts of the postwar Civil Rights movement tend to explain differences in white reaction between the north and south by comparing their respective racial compositions, geographies, and regional economies. Scholars such as Kevin Kruse and Lisa McGirr have offered substantial accounts for how processes such as deindustrialization and suburbanization fed into and were fueled by the fiery racial conflict engulfing northern cities throughout the fifties and sixties. These processes explain the different ways through which racial antagonism developed across the country.

These accounts, while crucial, are incomplete. Racial formation — both white and black — is a messy, uneven process of development that cannot only be explained by statistics such as population, racial composition, or industry. We must understand how the lives and identities of both whites and blacks were determined by and filtered through social relations such as private property. Studying racial formation and how whiteness was constituted during the postwar period means beginning not at the level of population demographics — the merely statistical — but at the level of those relations, like property, that bind individuals together into neighborhoods. 

One of the most crucial means through which private property bounded individuals together was religious community. Postwar scholars have tended to treat religion as merely as an identity individuals voluntarily assume rather than also a set of relations that structure and bound entire communities. This has been to the historical consensus’s detriment, as religious community during the twentieth century was crucial in mediating not only one’s relationship to private property but also racial identity.

One of the most decisive religious institutions in structuring the lives of American whites was the Roman Catholic Church. The Church was a profoundly important institution throughout the urban north that structured not only local communities and neighborhoods, but also urban whites’ responses to the Civil Rights movement. The Church, by virtue of its superintendence over urban life, had a powerful hand in reifying the white identity of parishoners. This influence upon white reaction was ultimately grounded in the property relations of the parish in structuring the neighborhood, ethnic nationalism, and white reaction.

Studying the role of the Church in defining whiteness through its particular property relations underscores the importance of understanding race not as a static category but as a living set of relations constantly reconfigured and reified through potlucks, parish halls, and homeowners’ associations. Accounting for the role of the Church in the urban north affords us a much clearer picture of why white backlash in northern cities like Chicago and New York unfolded so explosively.

White People and the Parish Steeple

The ethnic character of the white mobs throwing bricks and glass bottles at King and Civil Rights activists in Chicago was easily apparent to all parties. The african-american Chicago Defender declared “Nearly every man or woman arrested thus far in the Trumbull Park area bore names that very few Americans can pronounce ... It would appear that the people with (zuktjorsljp) names like this in parentheses should be advised by their leaders to live peacefully - the American way."² The people the ACLU identified as being active leaders within the anti-integration South Deering Improvement Association had names like “Nahirney, Santucci, Salvatore, Lalich, Mistovich, Bogdanovich, Kral, Kelly, Dorio, Robish, Michalik, Jarmusz…”³ Even the local papers serving the white ethnic Calumet Park area proudly "boast[ed] that it was Southern and Eastern Europeans who really built this country while Negroes were 'swinging in trees,' 'eating each other.'”⁴

Many of these white ethnics were, unsurprisingly, working-class Catholics. At some Chicago white riots, priests were brought out in hopes that their presence would calm the crowd. The Catholic Interracial Council conducted surveys illustrating that “many Catholics appeared to be participating in the anti-racial disturbances.”⁵ The central role of the white working-class Catholic figured prominently throughout the late-fifties and sixties as urban rebellions flared throughout the north.

One may rightfully ask where the Jews and Protestants were. Surely they were present among the housing mobs of Cicero or Gage Park. While there were undoubtedly some individual Jews and Protestants in the mobs, housing riots were most common in predominantly working-class Catholic neighborhoods. In contrast to their Irish and Italian Catholic counterparts, Jewish youth were reluctant to join street gangs in New York. In Chicago, black realtors brought clients into heavily Jewish neighborhoods and steered clear from the Catholic homeowners of the South and Southwest Sides. And White Protestants (already a small minority within many urban centers in the north) would generally flee rather than fight. A perplexed Chicago seminarian was at a loss for why strongly Catholic “neighborhoods are the most opposed to integration.”⁶

These peculiar patterns of white violence among white neighborhoods complicates our understanding of the centrality of housing to whiteness. In his study of postwar Oakland, Robert Self concludes that homeownership was akin to a melting pot where white ethnics and Anglo protestants from across the economic spectrum merged into a “tax-conscious voting bloc” especially in the face of an militant Civil Rights movement demanding housing integration.⁷ Although Richard Rothstein discusses friction among white Catholics, Protestants, and Jews regarding housing, Rothstein only discusses the matter in terms of a grudging mid-twentieth century WASP elite finally allowing Jews and Catholics to claim whiteness as a means of racial solidarity against ghetto rebellions and housing mobilizations.⁸ Little discussion is reserved for the reasons why white Catholics’ response to neighborhood integration was often far more violent than that of white Protestants and Jews.

The role of the parish is a critical component missing in discussions of why white violence within the urban north was so violent. The parish was not merely somewhere one went to church every Sunday. It did not merely help structure the neighborhood — the parish was the neighborhood. McGreevy hardly exaggerates when he states that “Catholics used the parish to map out space within all of the northern cities.”⁹ One of the first acts a new parish would do is send the priest out to knock door-to-door within the neighborhood, inquiring if the family inside was Catholic, registered with the parish, and receiving the sacraments. The parish was the defining institution of most urban northern white ethnics. A 1950s Detroit study found that 70 percent of the city’s Catholics claimed to attend services at least once a week compared to 33 percent of the city’s white Protestants and 12 percent of the city’s Jews.¹⁰

Crucially, the Catholic parish, unlike the Jewish synagogue or Protestant congregation, was immovable. As John McGreevy points out. Jews and Protestants could liquidate their property and relocate once blacks began moving in. But the property of the parish — including the church, parochial school, a convent, a rectory, and sometimes gymnasiums and auditoriums — were registered in the name of the diocese and therefore could not just be sold.

Scholars tend to take for granted the premium with which all whites put on homeownership and Americanness.¹¹ But working-class immigrants were more likely than middle-class native-born Americans to own their own homes in the north. Catholic immigrants heavily invested their savings in homeownership. In the heavily Catholic Back of the Yards area of Chicago, an impressive 57 percent of the homes were owned, and 90 percent of homeowners were foreign-born. In contrast to Catholics who flocked to single-family dwellings, Jews in the urban north tended to flock to large apartment buildings despite making more on average.¹² While homeownership is typically conceived to be the American Dream, it was especially so among working- and middle-class Catholics.

The white ethnic’s fixation on homeownership emerged from parish life. Both priest and parishioner were acutely aware of how spatially rooted the parish is. Priests exhorted parishioners to invest in property and homeownership with “mind-numbing” regularity. One priest during the 1920s proudly announced that more than 80 percent of his parishioners were homeowners; another Philadelphia priest urged his parish, almost entirely working-class, to buy their own homes as the most important step towards a stable, permanent parish life.¹³

The parish’s concentrated character meant that Catholic life was especially concentrated compared to Protestant and Jewish life. Studies of white Protestant churches in the early-twentieth century found that over half of the congregation lived outside the immediate area. Synagogues drew members from a broad area and competed with other synagogues for members.¹⁴ Coupled with the neighborhood-ward system of the urban north which made priests especially important political dealmakers, the Catholic Church was among the most important institutions shaping the everyday lives of white ethnic immigrants. 

The rooted character of the parish and the centripetal force it played in the lives of ethnic whites would play an important role in the urban uprisings to come. Whereas many Jewish and Protestant whites could “peacefully” integrate for a short period and then resegregate to the suburbs or periphery, white ethnic Catholics were far less willing to do the same. This recalcitrance is rooted in not only the metaphorical but literal feeling of pride in the parish property funded through parishioner tithes over the course of decades and the maintenance of well-preserved homes clustered around those parishes. 

The racial violence preserving these neighborhoods was not only powered by economic concern and racial pride but also ethnic nationalism and Catholic identity. After a century spanning the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century — toiling away in the perilous conditions of the meatpacking, auto, and steel industries, and enduring feelings of persecution under Prohibition and nativistic assault — southern and eastern european immigrants achieved some sense of stability. As Hirsch observes of a Polish neighborhood in Chicago, “The pride in these achievements and the construction of ‘beautiful residences’ was surpassed only by the sense of accomplishment that attended the residents' own, literal, construction of the new Polish Catholic Church.”¹⁵

Cracker Catholicism

On April 1, 1964, Alabama Governor and segregationist George Wallace visited Milwakee’s south side for a rally in support of his presidential campaign. The rally was organized by ex-Marine Milwaukee tavern owner Bronko Gruber at the St. Sava Serbian Orthodox Church. Hundreds of ethnic white blue-collar workers and small business owners packed the church and overflowed outside to support Wallace. A little less than a decade before, the place was packed to see liberal Democrat John F. Kennedy. 

South Milwaukee is what historian Dan Carter calls typical “Wallace country.”¹⁶ Neat single-family houses populated by largely white tradesmen and small business owners. Like Chicago, the adjacent black neighborhoods were expanding and pushing “invading” these neighborhoods. Bitterness and anger crackled through these neighborhoods as white residents fought to preserve the character of their homes, streets, and parishes. 

This bitterness did not emerge from a general, static racial category of what we call whiteness. It was a feeling generated by a conjuncture of place and time. Racial identity is, above all, relational, and the white Catholics voting for Wallace did so as a means of preservation — not only from the blacks “invading” their neighborhoods, but also the Anglo and Jewish whites by whom they were allegedly betrayed. 

Important in understanding the nature of this bitterness is white flight. Normally, one understands white flight as simply being the movement of whites out of a neighborhood as blacks move in. But the mid-twentieth century white flight, both in the north and south, belied a crisis of white solidarity. 

The rapid growth of Chicago’s black ghetto triggered a desperate competition between different groups of whites as the successful “defense” of one white neighborhood from black “invasion” led to the mounting crisis of another. Residents of the heavily Jewish and upper middle-class Hyde Park were able to accomplish the double-movement of at once celebrating racial integration while at the same time “save” itself from blacks moving in by redeveloping affordable housing out of the neighborhood (ironically, the only “blighted” areas of Hyde Park were predominantly white ethnic). As Hirsch notes, working-class white Catholics saw this peculiar response to integration as both “self-serving and threatening by those concerned outside observers.”¹⁷

The process of white flight worked the other way as well: Jewish and Protestant neighborhoods being successfully “invaded” led white ethnic Catholics to cling even tighter to their white identity. White ethnic Catholics, too tied to their parishes to leave, were “left behind” by their fellow “whites” to act as buffer zones to blacks moving in. Flowering out of these “buffer zone” neighborhoods throughout the fifties and sixties were homeowners’ associations standing athwart working and middle-class blacks fighting for better and more affordable housing. 

These homeowners associations leveraged militaristic language and spoke of blacks as “invaders'' and electing block “captains.” The territoriality of the parish made it well-suited as a base of operations for homeowners’ groups. Thomas Sugrue writes at length about how a good number of Detroit priests encouraged parishioners to join their local homeowners’ associations “for fear that black ‘invasions’ would hurt parish life.”¹⁸ Even while the Catholic hierarchy became more liberal on racial issues throughout the fifties and sixties, there remained many parish priests who were in lockstep with parishioners in calling for the defense of their neighborhoods against integration. 

The anger that white ethnic Catholics felt towards their fellow whites whom they believed to be either naive or malicious was heightened by top-down forces. Real estate brokers would often trigger white flight by paying blacks to walk through white neighborhoods and making calls to white residents. Although scholars like Beryl Sattler rightly point out that most brokers avoided this form of "blockbusting," the practice was nevertheless carried out by a few unscrupulous contract brokers “introducing” blacks into white neighborhoods, allowing them to rush in and buy cheap from departing whites and sell dear to blacks moving in.¹⁹ These white brokers were viewed as not only race traitors, outsiders to the community, but also Jewish.

There was also the unseen but felt influence of wealthy and predominantly Jewish and Anglo Protestant city planners and businessmen who used the power of eminent domain to “blight” white ethnic neighborhoods under the aegis of urban improvement. Hirsch accounts how the latter in Chicago viewed residence in the suburbs as “desirable and possible… it was certainly not a prospect to be dreaded, even if one was ‘pushed’ there by changing inner-city realities.” While the planners occupying the interlocking municipal committees and agencies were upwardly-mobile professionals and big businessmen, the ringleaders of the white neighborhood racial violence — such as in Trumbull Park — were tradesmen who owned their own businesses, had trouble paying their bills, and we're second or third generation ethnic immigrants.²⁰

These pressures from without and within fomented a feeling of persecution and paranoia which to outsiders felt especially galling. White ethnics felt the traditional religious-property order was being “subverted” while their fellow whites abandoned them for the suburbs and the federal government increasingly adopted infrastructure and development plans that enabled blacks to move in. White ethnics’ siege mentality — wrought by the perceived trinity of intellectuals, government planners, and big businessmen — was made all the more frightening by the effects of automation and capital flight crippling northern industry beginning in the forties. These historical processes met at the nexus of the Catholic working-class parish, a pressure cooker out of which would sprout the mass base of the Nixon and Reagan counter-revolutions of the seventies and eighties.

Parish Property and the “New” Whites

Of course, Catholics were not completely victimized, nor by any means were they the biggest losers. The Catholic voting bloc still held and exercised significant hold over the urban political machines. Mayor Daley in Chicago was Catholic, and clerics like Cardinal Stritch were able to successfully maneuver highways away from important parishes into black neighborhoods.²¹ But studying the particular attachments with which working-class Catholics felt towards the parish and their struggles is crucial for understanding why white ethnics felt that their way of life was being “attacked” — even if that way of life was predicated on the racial domination of blacks and the continual reification of the urban ghetto. 

The role the parish played in structuring the lives of white ethnic clarifies why, curiously, there were far more riots in the urban North than the urban South. While Kevin Kruse sensibly points to Atlanta having a much larger percentage of black residents than Chicago for why there fewer riots during the Civil Rights movement, a key component missing from Kruse’s analysis is how many more whites living in Chicago had their lives structured by and rooted in the parish's presupposed property relations.

We cannot simply say that racial conflict unfolded in certain ways because the proportion of undifferentiated blacks and undifferentiated whites varied across geography. During the fifties, members of the white majority-Protestant neighborhoods in Atlanta generally bargained or cajoled their prospective black neighbors or, failing that, fled for the suburbs.²² In contrast, the urban north was embroiled in an “era of hidden violence” as working-class white ethnics and blacks engaged in an urban guerilla war from block to block and house to house.²³

The parish is also critical to understanding the politics of the postwar era. During the sixties, Democratic party was caught within a central contradiction from California to Wisconsin — a white ethnic working-class at once firmly pro-union but also fiercely opposed to integrated housing. In early-sixties California, liberal Democrat Lyndon Johnson trounced conservative Republican Barry Goldwater while Proposition 14—a referendum to repeal a ban on racial discrimination in home sales—passed by even higher margins.²⁴ Milwaukee, a powerful union stronghold and one of the few cities overseen by a socialist government, held strong vote returns for the segregationist states’ rights candidate George Wallace. 

Curiously, the racism with which ethnic whites held in the parish neighborhood dissipated somewhat at the factory floor. The same white ethnics who were strongly opposed to blacks moving in were also tolerant of their presence in the workplace and within unions. Of course, as countless scholars have illustrated, many trade unions were complicit in reifying the labor apartheid that kept blacks at the bottom or out of unionized trade and manufacturing jobs.²⁵ The relative racial tolerance in the workplace compared to the neighborhood speaks to the particular bonds working-class white ethnics felt towards parish neighborhoods and thereby property. The seeming multi-faceted racism also helps to explain how strongly pro-union New Dealers would vote for arch-conservatives like Goldwater and segregationists like Wallace as the sixties unfolded.

Finally, the parish points to how whiteness by no means is a static category but is instead a lived set of social relations — something that, for some groups like working-class whites, was irrevocably tied up in the illiquid real estate property fostered by the Catholic structure of religious community. Whiteness is not only changing but also relative. Facing outwards, working-class Catholics may claim the banner of whiteness in the face of the black ghetto, but turned inwards, they struggled to slot themselves within a wobbling hierarchy of other “white” groups whose place was in a constant state of re-negotiation. Not only is an “other” that differentiates whiteness from blackness necessary for the former to exist, but also an “other” within that category of whiteness dividing workers and capitalists, Protestants and Catholics, and Polish and Slav. Whiteness, if it’s to reproduce through time, requires division within and without. 

As sociologist Stuart Hall writes, race, above all, is the modality through which class is lived. A key first-step to fleshing out the radical struggles of the fifties and sixties is beginning from the most local unit of American society — not just the neighborhood, but the parish.

1.  https://www.latimes.com/la-me-dozens-hurt-during-march-19660806-story.html

2. Hirsch, Arnold R. Making the Second Ghetto: Race & Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960. The University of Chicago Press. 252-253

3. Hirsch. Making the Second Ghetto. 205.

4. Hirsch, 81.

5. Hirsch, 85.

6. McGreevy, John T.. Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North. The University of Chicago Press. 101-103.

7. Self, Robert. American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. Princeton University Press. 17

8. Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. W.W. Norton & Company. 228

9. McGreevy. 15-16.

10. McGreevy. Parish Boundaries. 13.

11. See Kenneth Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier, 11; Lizabeth Cohen’s Making a New Deal, 76; and Robert Self’s American Babylon.

12. McGreevy, 18.

13. McGreevy, 19.

14. McGreevy, John T.. Parish Boundaries. 18-20.

15. Hirsch, 195.

16. Carter, Dan T. The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics. Louisiana State University Press. 205-206

17. Hirsch, 169-173.

18. Sugrue, Thomas. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton University Press. 214.

19. Satter, Beryl. Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America. Picador. 68-73.

20. Hirsch, 204.

21. McGreevy, 125.

22. Kruse, Kevin. White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism. Princeton University Press. 74-104.

23. Hirsch, 40-67.

24. Self. American Babylon. 168.

25. For more reading on the complicity of trade unions in the reproduction of racial apartheid in American labor markets read Sugrue’s Origins of the Urban Crisis; Cohen’s Making a New Deal; and Katznelson’s When Affirmative Action was White; and Foner’s Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619-1981.