By Rita McInerney

Grambling is a typical small college town in the hill country of north central Louisiana, an easy drive over Interstate 20. People there don’t speak of the town and campus as separate. They are one, say those who live there.

When Grambling State University was founded as the Colored Industrial and Agricultural Institute of Lincoln Parish by Charles P. Adams, of Tuskegee, Ala., in 1901, the town was one block long. Today there are 6,800 students enrolled.

Sports fans know of the prowess of the school’s football and basketball teams. More than 90 percent of the football players graduate, many are signed by professional teams.

Grambling’s famed Tigers marching band is the pride of its excellent music department. Wearing Grambling black and gold, touched with red, it has performed in every domed stadium in the country, at the Rose Bowl, Superbowls No. 1, 9 and 20. The high stepping musicians have performed in Tokyo six times and have traveled to Liberia.

Father Lyke returned to Grambling in 1977 from Memphis. Civil rights issues no longer dominated life in the black college town as they had in the 1960s.

His first assignment there had been as a seminarian in the Summer of 1965. With two white seminarians he served for nine weeks in student ministry and voter registration efforts. They encountered prejudice, were “ejected from public places, followed like criminals and bomb-threatened,” he was later to tell a newspaper reporter.

The priest they stayed with, Father Lawrence, “took us to a restaurant in Winnfield where we were thrown out.” The owners were furious with the priest for bringing in the black youth. “I recall being followed out of town by the police and the (Ku Klux) Klan,” the article mentions.

When the energetic Father Lyke came back to town, St. Benedict’s parish became St. Benedict’s the Black. The first black priest to serve there, he instilled an awareness of their African heritage in the congregation.

Casandra Lyles, active parishioner then and today, recalls he helped bring into the Church, “the new consciousness.” For the first time, the figures in the Nativity scene for the Christmas midnight Mass were black. “Father Jim” hung quotations by Martin Luther King Jr. on the walls of the Newman Center, red, green and black became familiar colors in the church and center.

Awareness of black Catholic realities came through in his homilies. Casandra Lyle remembers them being related to the age and experience of parishioners. “I called them little assignments.”

“He always respected our intelligence and called us to a higher level. But we could always apply his message to our own problems. Listening to him. I would think, ‘How did he know this about me?’”

Bessie McKinney, president of the parish council during his years there, says he “revitalized” the parish. He brought speakers to both church and campus, friends like Father John Ford, Sister Thea Bowman, Father Cyprian Davis and Brother Joseph Davis. There were seminars on drugs, speakers from Hale High School in Chicago. “He brought a lot of priests and scholars that we were not familiar with,” she says. “He was caring and sharing with the entire Grambling community. You didn’t have to be Catholic.”

That’s another quality Miss Lyles appreciated. He involved a lot of young people. “The question with him was not whether they were Catholic but if the experience would help the child.”

Father Lyke went to Grambling believing there he would find more time to work on his doctoral thesis, according to Father Edward Branch, who succeeded him in 1979.

During the five years of their campus stints, “We got two priests” from among the students, Father Rothell Price and Father David Jones, Father Branch points out.

“He found a place that needed him. It wasn’t less demanding by the time he left, he created a lot,” says Father Branch, now Newman Center chaplain at the Clark-Atlanta University Center complex.

He was responsible for new structures of campus ministry, the Newman student advisory council, the student choir at St. Benedict’s, a speakers’ forum open to everyone at the university.

“His was a ministry of presence,” Father Branch says. “He would be here, there and everywhere.”

Father Price was not a Catholic when he came to Grambling. He soon came to know the energetic chaplain who could be found in the student union, in the dorms, all over the campus.

When Price began to use the Newman Center as did so many other students, as a study hall and gathering place, he found a “real ease” and a “sense of excitement” in talking with Father Jim. He started learning about the Catholic faith with him and later was baptized by Father Branch.

“The major reason I’m a priest today is because of Father Jim and his role in my faith growth. He’s been a blessing to me and I know he will be a blessing to the church in Atlanta.”

Father Price, now pastor at Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament parish and academy in Shreveport, said during his student years at Grambling, the parish and campus ministry “functioned as one family.” Parishioners would adopt students in financial or other kinds of difficulty, would invite them into their homes for holidays when they couldn’t get to their own homes. “Father could always get a family to help.”

Danton Wilson arrived on campus at about the same time as the black Franciscan. “He was very much a part of our lives,” recalls Wilson, now executive editor of the Michigan Chronicle, an African American weekly in Detroit.

“We students would often find ourselves at his home, talking well into midnight.” Sometimes they would be joined by prominent speakers the priest brought to the campus to address the student body.

“He helped me get over personal frustration at not being as good on the basketball court as I was academically,” Wilson admits. And gave him confidence. “I never had the sense I couldn’t go on to become a newspaper editor.”

Sherbie James Matthews played trumpet and considered trying out for the famed Grambling band. Although a Catholic, his musical involvement had not been in church.

Father Lyke changed that when Sherbie tried out for the choir the young chaplain was organizing at the Newman Center. “A few weeks later I was directing the choir.” The priest recognized “skills I didn’t know I had,” he says.

He still uses his musical gifts for the church. He was minister of music for his parish, Holy Cross in Dallas, Tex., for 11 years and serves on the music subcommission for the Dallas diocese.

The Franciscan “didn’t push” Gospel music on the student choir, Sherbie says, but rather “made us aware of the beauty of our heritage.”

“The “super inspirational” Sister Thea did also. The priest invited her to Grambling to do workshops at the university shortly after the choir formed. During this visit she made a presentation at St. Benedict’s with the new choir joining her in some numbers.

The student Sherbie met the young chaplain at a time in his life when he needed spiritual guidance. He was able to share his problems with his priest friend. He listened, wouldn’t advise a specific action, “but encouraged you to make your own choice, to respond in a positive way.”

Fidelia Johnson, 86, daughter of the Grambling founder, says “We understood him and he understood us.”

Outspoken pastor and outspoken parishioners were drawn to each other.

“He was loved by all of us, also non-Catholic in the community. When he left it broke our hearts,” the woman fondly known as “Momma Fi” recalls.

She spoke of his caring. “He looked after our religious needs and when we were ill we knew he would be there for us.”

“When he was made auxiliary bishop we followed him up (for his installation). About 15 people went. This will tell you what we thought about him,” Momma Fi declares.

“Everyone gravitated to him,” says Dr. Mildred Gallo, head of the Grambling history department. She recalled a time when her husband Richard had the flu and couldn’t man the liquor store they owned in town. She had to work the night hours. “Father Lyke came to keep me company so I wouldn’t be alone.”

Some local ministers were shocked, she felt. But he liked to watch people and talk to them and the store was a center of community life. “Father Lyke ministered wherever he was.”

Several months before he was named a bishop, St. Benedict the Black celebrated Black History Week with a liturgy to remember. A painting, “Jesus, the Lord of Grambling,” by Thomas Smith, associate professor of art, was blessed. The church bulletin for Feb. 11, 1979, says the liberation colors “remind us that this Jesus, Our Lord and Savior, is that non-conforming change agent who broke the human law and custom for the sake of a higher divine law which is ‘no respecter of persons and shows no partiality,’ a determined radical who risked his life so that others might be free.”

A new Baldwin organ was dedicated at the celebration. A proud moment came for CCD students when they displayed interpretations of famous black men and women they had painted.

Toward the end of his Grambling days one of the matriarchs noticed his trimmed Afro hairstyle. “Are they going to make you a bishop or something?” she asked. Later, when the Afro became even less so, it became the talk of the parish. When on June 28, 1979, he finally was free to announce that he would be going to Cleveland as auxiliary bishop, the woman who had first guessed was delighted at her prediction.

Shortly after he was informed of his appointment as bishop, the Franciscan told a reporter he had a dream. In it he told Pope John Paul II that if it were up to him he would remain at Grambling for at least two more years.

“It was not up to me to become pope ant it is not up to you to become bishop,” the pope in the dream replied.