March on Minneapolis

“The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,” Martin Luther King Jr. 

Whenever the March on Washington comes up, I throw in that I marched on Minneapolis. These smaller marches around the country don’t usually get noticed, but this one did this year, on the 60^th anniversary, August 28, 2023,  because I was invited to be on a panel that night. 

I was in Minneapolis as a delegate from the College of St. Elizabeth in New Jersey to the convention of the National Federation of Catholic College Students. This was very big for me: my first time on a plane, my first trip west of the Delaware River. 

We were young activists. We were inspired by Catholic social justice teaching which was closely aligned with King’s most radical visions. Of course we joined the city’s witness downtown. Honestly, I don’t remember much about the event, except the skyscrapers and the singing and what seemed like a big crowd. 

But I must have been paying attention. I was elected student body president the next year. I made one of my projects recruiting civil rights workers for the summer of ’64. My favorite example was getting students for Tom Hayden of the SDS, who was doing community organizing in Newark. He became more famous later.

I myself went with two others from my college to Lafayette, Louisiana, to do voter registration and religious education. This time it was a long bus ride, 43 hours on Greyhound. I saw a lot of the South and a lot of segregation, a lot of churches and a lot of red clay.

Philadelphian Jane Duffin led the program with Louisiana members of the Grail, mostly white Catholic lay women. I would say we were more successful with the church work and the preteens than with the voter registration and the adults. 

We were introducing the new American Mass Program, written by Black priest Clarence Rivers. We were teaching post Vatican II theology in a Black parish. And we were having fun, organizing events, making friends with the kids.  Some continued to write me for a couple of years. Not easy lives.

But our college French didn’t really cut it with those we were trying to register to vote. Explaining in either language the answers to a legal-size sheet of obscure civics questions was really difficult. I felt so bad to see the fear in the eyes of those who answered their doors. They politely declined to get involved. I also saw unpaved streets and lack of buses in these neighborhoods of very small houses. I couldn’t help but notice the difference between the resources of the Black church and the white church.

We workers lived in an integrated house, which I believed was illegal at that time. We welcomed guests from the Black community and the University of Southwestern Louisiana. One I remember was Lafayette native Father Joseph Francis, who later became the fourth Black bishop in the US. 

We received threatening phone calls but were not attacked. in June when Goodman, Schwerner and Cheney went missing in Mississippi, some girls went home. But when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law in early July, we felt triumphant. We assumed that the rights in the law were immediately effective and went out to dinner all together that night. I remember the shocked look on faces of the restaurant hosts and other diners, but they did not refuse us service.

King’s strategy of massing public support in Washington and New Jersey and Minnesota resulted in federal legislation that could change what happened in Louisiana. 

I know now that I shared part of the middle of the civil rights movement, a small part. 

I then thanked the members of the Lombard Swim Club who came to this “Sandy’s Coffee and Conversation” on the upper deck the night the bar is closed. The session was organized by Eric Weinberg, who shared reflections he had written 18 months after the Washington event, as well as history and statistics about what had changed and what hadn’t after 60 years. Jonathan Takiff shared how his political mother got them great seats and how much the folk music, especially, meant to him as a young performer. Three years later, King tested coming out against the Vietnam war at a gathering at his parents’ home. Pat Kimmelman joined the Swim Club that year and cancelled settlement on her new home in the neighborhood to go to the March that day. Audience members asked questions and made comments and seemed really engaged. This club is my summer home in the city; while there are plenty of aquatic activities, it provides social opportunities for every age group, and daily lunch and dinner. A community, like a church, increasingly rare in this world. Obviously sharing deep values, this group at least.