By Rita McInerney

What it was like to be a black child in a segregated Georgia city in the 1950s was described by Joyce King to 77 people, clergy and laity, gathered Wednesday, March 5 at the Catholic Center for a workshop on racism.

Mrs. King, a native of Albany, Ga., and a member of Sts. Peter and Paul parish in Decatur, shared with the group an incident that “hurt me as a child.” Her audience shared this pain as she told of her mother, a worker in a pecan processing plant when the minimum wage was raised to one dollar an hour. The increase so angered the boss that he told the assembled workers that he “had never seen a nigger woman worth one dollar an hour.”

When her mother repeated the remark to her family it made a bitter impression on the 11-year-old girl, an impression that remained, “in the back of my mind.”

The Albany of her growing-up years, Mrs. King said, was a city where officials closed the parks, recreation centers and libraries for several years rather than integrate them. Where the bus system was shut down for the same reason, and where black children walked to school while the white youngsters were bused. School textbooks were bought new for the whites and later handed down to the black school.

Meeting Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a few years later, in 1962, was a memorable experience for Joyce King. “Just to hear him talk motivated me,” she recalled. She worked in voter registration in Albany for a year and participated in civil rights actions while still in high school.

She was jailed on two occasions, once for five days, and the second time for three days. The first was a protest against the segregated lunch counter at the bus station and the second time a demonstration against the arrest of a young woman student from Albany State College.

“We were taken to unfriendly jails in surrounding towns where the local citizens threatened to come in and beat us up. I wasn’t frightened. It was my way of saying I didn’t like it.”

A convert, Mrs. King wishes the Catholic Church would take a more active role in integration and interaction between black and white parishes, on both the worship and social level. For the schools, she said “if we were really committed” there could be integration with kindergarten through fourth grade children going to one school and fifth through eighth grade students going to another, rather than having all-black or all-white schools. For her it’s “still two different worlds.”

She ended her talk with a challenge: “I challenge our country to take our Constitution one step further. It is true that all men are created equal but all men are not born equally. There is a difference in being born and created. God created everybody but the situation that we are born into determines a person’s lifestyle. It is left up to us to change the situations that so many people find themselves born into.”

Mrs. King’s “witness” demonstrated the effectiveness of the sharing and listening format for the workshop conducted by Msgr. Thomas Reese of the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice in Washington, D.C. Experiences such as Mrs. King’s help to open the eyes of those who hear, Msgr. Reese said.

Another “witness” many in the room could identify with was Sister Anna B. Kearns, C.S.J. Southern by birth, a native of Augusta, she said her life as a Religious had taken her to St. Louis, New York, Hawaii, and Boston before coming to Atlanta where she is principal of Our Lady of Lourdes School. Racism was just a word until she accepted an invitation to teach in Boston with a group of black sisters from 17 different communities. The invitation was for one year. She stayed 10.

The civil rights struggle had taken place during the 10 years she taught in Hawaii, so her education in regard to racism began when she moved to Roxbury, a black neighborhood of Boston. “It was there that I began to get a new conscience,” she said. “It gives you hope that you can change.”

Being black isn’t the problem, as Sister Anna sees it, being white is the problem. “You have to face it head on and look at it in a new way. White is a constant reminder that we are not racially neutral and also a reminder that we participate in racial institutes and cultures.”

“We must reconstruct our understanding of who we are and what we must do. We must see ourselves as the real problem and learn to deal with causes, not symptoms. We must learn to affirm ourselves and others and take steps to go beyond racism, to develop a quality of life fulfilling for all others.”

After a box lunch break, the afternoon session opened with a “vision” talk by Steve Brazen, executive assistant as Catholic Social Services, who expressed hope that the Church can be the reconciler, the social pioneer in the struggle against racism. The external situations; white flight, exclusionary zoning, inferior school systems, lack of equal opportunities, affect parishes in their attitudes to blacks and other minorities, he said, and hurt the internal, spiritual life of the parish.

“How do you deal with people who want to move? How do we experience reconciliation and forgiveness? The Church can play the role of reconciler and bring people together. We must touch the hearts of people.

Brazen sees encouraging signs in parishes that are asking “How do we bridge the gap?” in bringing blacks, Hispanics, Vietnamese and other minorities into the mainstream of parish life. “There are not a lot of answers but the fact that people are looking gives me hope. People going to night shelters gives me hope.”

We have the possibility, he said, the vision of comprehensive love, for caring for everybody in the parish. And we have to find a way, he insists, to “bring the prejudiced person to the table with us. We have to be compassionate, not self-righteous. You and I can be pioneers to break out of those boxes on the local level. When we step out of that box and touch the unknown we have life.”

Brazen believes that at the parish level, “we have everything we need to deal with this issue.” If we decide that the effort should be extended to everything within the geographical boundaries “we might be able to pioneer and show other denominations how to deal with the issue.”

Brazen quoted H. Richard Niebuhr, contemporary protestant theologian, on the ideal church: “Church meets its social responsibility when, in its own thinking, organization and action, it functions as a world society undivided by race, class or national interest.”

“Let us be a global community, let us be the reconcilers who bring people together where everyone said it would be impossible,” he urged his audience.

It was not just listening for workshop participants. The five or six people at each table shared and probed personal experiences and viewpoints and discussed case studies on situations ranging from integrating parishes, crime in the neighborhood, and individual bigotry.

“Don’t wait a long time to do this again” was heard several times during the recommendations from participants as the workshop concluded. Encouraged by the session, several mentioned that risk taking is necessary in attempting to solve the problem of racism in parishes. On the diocesan level it was suggested that a peace and justice commission be appointed with a subcommittee on racial justice. The needs of black seminarians and a formation program for people moving into segregated areas were other areas mentioned.

A black man reminded the others at the workshop that the experience of blacks in America comes out of slavery – a slavery that destroyed basic values and all support systems.

“If we could just listen to people,” someone else said. “I’d like to see every one of us be more specific in proclaiming brotherhood of all humankind.”