ONE JOURNALIST'S BEGINNINGS From Dayton, Texas, to the University of Notre Dame and on to the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune
Wycliff, Don
ONE JOURNALIST'S BEGINNINGS Faith, family & race Don Wycliff Ican as easily imagine myself not Catholic as I can imagine myself not black. Which is to say that I cannot imagine it at all. 1...
...As I watched the Chicago media do their splendid work, I began to feel myself attracted to that work as a socially relevant and useful way to spend a life...
...Your children will be welcome here...
...The church simply does not have many spokespersons— any spokesperson?—who can articulate its message in a way that makes it relevant and understandable to modern men and women of a secularist bent...
...I can't imagine not thinking of life in terms of sin and grace and sacrifice and the cross and the resurrection...
...The presence of those photos bespeaks the importance to my parents of their Catholic faith, and of our education and upbringing in it...
...It is a veritable Wydiff family gallery...
...The all-news station crackled with word of a "shootout" overnight between units of the Chicago police assigned to the Cook County State's Attorney's office and members of the Black Panther Party on the city's West Side...
...Indeed, I saw something of myself in Hampton: We were both young black men full of passion to see our people's lot improved...
...In one crucial respect, however, Ashland was an improvement: It had an alternative to the segregated black public school in the form of Holy Family School...
...It was his immediate supervisor at work, Walter Graybeal—a lapsed Catholic from Lafayette, Indiana...
...Daddy's mother, my grandmother, was a Baptist...
...We could not, for example, go to the downtown movie theaters at all in Ashland...
...In the days and weeks following the "shootout," the Panther story consumed me...
...The ice was broken...
...There is an enormous amount of anti-Catholic sentiment in newsrooms, as there is in the society at large...
...It wasn't until the end of the spring quarter at the University of Chicago that I got up the gumption to strike out Commonweal 11 December 21,2001 in a new direction...
...Catholics for a Free Choice is the same as any other Catholic group or opinion— or at least that's what that Catholic historian or theologian on CNN or ABC or in the New York Times said...
...In my experience, however, it is not...
...The brand name "Catholic" has been devalued in the marketplace through confusion...
...By then, he and Mother had five children—Franqois, Don, Karen, Christopher, Ida—and a sixth, Joy, on the way...
...Why not...
...His ticket out was a civil service exam that brought an offer of a job as an instructor of industrial arts at the Federal Correctional Institution—a federal prison—in Ashland, Kentucky...
...In those days, such words carried weight, coming from the Irish Catholic pastor of a largely Irish Catholic parish...
...1 can't imagine not getting up on Sunday morning, going to my parish church, and sharing with my friends and neighbors there in the celebration of the Eucharist...
...D Commonweal 12 December 21, 2001...
...Holy Family, I later realized, was for us an ark, a refuge...
...My subsequent Catholic education set me on a certain path...
...his father, my grandfather, was a Catholic...
...Photos cover almost every inch of wall space...
...Mother tells of her anxiety in taking us to school on the first day— this was, after all, just months after the Supreme Court had overturned "separate but equal" public schooling in its nowcelebrated Brown decision and the South, of which Kentucky was definitely a part, was full of talk of "massive resistance...
...I did the same for ten years at the Chicago Tribune, and for nine of those years I served as editorial page editor...
...The passion for justice and righteousness cultivated by my parents and teachers had led me to my profession...
...But one particular aspect of those pictures makes that point with special force...
...It has always baffled me to hear and see black Catholics referred to as unusual, because in my earliest years I was surrounded by black Catholics in Dayton and the other nearby communities...
...Mother's parents both were Catholics, with roots in those Creole communities of southern Louisiana...
...I wrote editorials for more than five years at the New York Times...
...You'll never know what a smile can mean to a person," Mother says as she recalls that day...
...Daddy shipped out for Italy with the allblack 92nd Division not long afterwards...
...we at least had been able to sit in the balcony in Dayton...
...The last sixteen of those have been in the most rarified part of the industry: opinion writing...
...In some respects it was worse than Dayton...
...Graybeal asked...
...But there was no such resistance at Holy Family...
...He was trying to do it one way...
...Well, why shouldn't your kids go to the Catholic school...
...The reasons are complex...
...It was Father Carroll...
...Daddy was an only child...
...a white man who, Daddy swears, sacrificed his career advancement by routinely going to bat on Daddy's behalf—who first broached the idea of Holy Family as an alternative...
...I was trying another...
...I knew of Fred Hampton only what I had seen of him during brief television interviews in the weeks preceding his death...
...Being Catholic and being black also account for my choice of journalism as a profession, because that dual identity has shaped the way I respond to injustice and it demands that I be involved in social action to right wrongs and redress inequities...
...Ashland was not exactly the racial Promised Land...
...They did, and in August 1954 the family packed up and moved north to join him...
...Two Panther leaders, Fred Hampton and Marc Clark, had been killed in the exchange...
...The only other dark face in the photo is that of Francois, who, dressed in the cassock and surplice of an acolyte, stands to one side of the pastor, Monsignor Declan Carroll...
...The stock in trade of opinion writers is ideas—ideas that challenge, provoke, clarify...
...His got him killed— unjustly, I was convinced...
...My parents, Wilbert and Emily, were married on June 2,1942 in Bisbee, Arizona, where Daddy, an Army lieutenant, was stationed at the time...
...It took me only a few weeks to realize that I did not want to be there...
...One of Daddy's coworkers at the prison, Charles Eckenrode, who later became my confirmation sponsor, told him about it later...
...Anyway, I was interviewed and hired...
...My father, now eightythree, related to me a few years ago how we came to be on Commonweal 9 December21,2001 that ark...
...No picture was taken of him and his small class of First Communicants at Saint Joseph the Worker Church in Dayton, Texas...
...I would get up in the morning, buy every newspaper I could find and devour the latest news...
...It was shot on a sunny spring day in 1955, on the front steps of Holy Family Church in Ashland, Kentucky...
...Along with my race, my religion has always been a pillar of my identity in this life, in this society...
...We were treated more than properly...
...For the last year, I have written a column of personal opinion, mainly about issues of media process and ethics, but often about other matters as well...
...Daddy went to the parish and talked with Father Carroll...
...Frankly, attempting to bring what little I know of that distinguished Catholic intellectual tradition to bear on deliberations in the newsroom or the editorial boardroom usually gives me fits...
...On one hand, it meant that Mother would kill the fatted calf and we would eat exceptionally well...
...But always, always, the most powerful passage of all is Matthew 25: 31-46...
...I can't imagine not having that mystical sense of connectedness with other Catholics all over the globe through the prayers and rituals and tradition and teaching of the church...
...There must have been at least fifty children in the class, girls and boys...
...Mother and Daddy both were born and raised in Dayton, a farming community in East Texas, almost exactly halfway between Houston and Beaumont on U.S...
...And anyone who doesn't will have to answer to me...
...He earned his degree in industrial education in 1950...
...Daddy was raised "basically Baptist" and converted to Catholicism after he and Mother were married...
...At the most basic level, Catholicism suffers from the same disability in attempting to influence the news media as it suffers from in its pulpits on Sunday mornings: bad preaching...
...I finally made my way to the spanking new offices of the Houston Post and filled out a job application, telling the lady in the personnel office that I wanted to be a reporter...
...Additionally—and this will not be much appreciated by Catholic liberals—the Catholic Church in America has become a Tower of Babel...
...I did not plan to be a journalist...
...One of mother's aunts was a nun in the Sisters of the Holy Family, a black order in New Orleans...
...So also did the fact that, at that time, there was all of one black reporter in the Post newsroom and there was unease in the city over a Black Panthertype group that called itself Peoples Party II...
...There had been no shootout...
...It says something important about our family that, right along with the graduation photos and baby pictures and wedding and prom poses, my parents have hung the First Communion class pictures of eight of their nine children, me and my seven younger siblings...
...in another respect it was utterly uncommon...
...Daddy recalled to me how he visited the black public school, Booker T. Washington, saw the decrepit building and equipment, and was heartsick at the thought of sending his children there...
...Some is more sophisticated, holding the pope responsible for famine and starvation because of the church's official opposition to artificial birth control and abortion...
...We were always ambivalent when Sister Ambrose came for one of her extended visits...
...I think it is fair to say that we were embraced as part of the Holy Family Parish family...
...To be sure, there was some nervousness at first...
...You're a Catholic, aren't you, Wye...
...As he related it to me, the priest told him, "Well, Mr...
...But when we washed up in Ashland, on the banks of the Ohio River east of Cincinnati, in autumn 1954, the Wycliffs were the only black family in the parish and we children were the only black kids in the school...
...I hoped to get into TV news, but had no luck at the stations there...
...Mother was the second oldest of ten...
...in my studio apartment at 47th Street and Drexel Boulevard and flipped on the radio next to my bed...
...1 had graduated in June 1969 from the University of Notre Dame and been admitted to graduate study at the University of Chicago and given a fellowship to finance it...
...The oldest picture, taken not many years after the Civil War, is of a woman ancestor three generations before my parents...
...But I suppose the educational pedigree helped...
...I can't imagine not thinking of the pope as the head of my church, the vicar of Christ, the principal teacher and shepherd of the faithful...
...Still, while I didn't want to be doing what I was where I was, I had no idea what else I might want or be able to do— until December 4,1969...
...I am blessed to have had a career of (so far) thirty years in the news industry...
...The University of Chicago was so thoroughly disconnected from the neighborhood, the city, and the social ferment surrounding it, it might as well have been on the moon...
...You'd have had a hard time convincing me of it at first, but we were blessed to be there...
...I should have been surprised when they agreed to give me an interview—nobody walks into a big-city newspaper off the street and gets an interview, much less a job...
...The Catholic Church, with possibly the oldest and richest intellectual history in the Western world, ought to be a powerful contender for the time and attention of columnists and editorial writers at the nation's newspapers...
...I watched every TV show I could...
...It was in every sense of the word a genuine calling, a discovery of a vocation...
...Some of it is plain old lowbrow bigotry—I've heard Catholics referred to on more than one occasion as "mackerel-snappers...
...I want them treated properly...
...These two facets of my identity account for the way I think about, feel about, and react to almost everything that I experience and observe...
...Non-Catholics—and many Catholics as well—have become confused because there is no Catholic trademark to distinguish one so-called Catholic opinion from another...
...The newest picture also is of a female, a member of the third generation after my parents...
...Or at least it was a theoretical alternative, because to that date, no black child had ever gone to the Catholic school...
...After the war Daddy came home and, using his GI benefit, went part time to the Texas State University for Negroes (now Texas Southern University) in Houston while working at various jobs to support his family...
...It would never be otherwise in the segregated South, he realized, and so he resolved to leave...
...Interestingly, the older I get the more I find myself attracted to the passages about forgiveness and reconciliation...
...So what do I do...
...Not only am I unable to speak authoritatively about Catholic positions, I am unable to/eel authoritative...
...And the lively engagement with people and ideas and social movements that I had enjoyed at Notre Dame was absent in the intense, isolated atmosphere of graduate school at Chicago...
...The only one missing is my older brother Francois's, and that's because, as best I can determine, it never existed...
...And I listened to the radio constantly for news...
...The other pictures show pretty much the same racial pattern, although there is at least a sprinkling of other African Americans in the classes of the youngest siblings...
...But let me ask the bishop...
...Take my picture, for example...
...The bishop said the Catholic schools are for all Catholic children," Father Carroll said...
...There was, Mother says, a moment's hesitation and then another Commonweal 10 December 21,2001 mother smiled, walked over to her and introduced herself and her daughter, who was the same age and had the same name as my sister Karen...
...I read a lot of Scripture and try to apply what I read to the situations that present themselves in the news...
...Gradually, the Chicago news media unearthed and exposed the truth...
...I had no relationship to the Black Panthers...
...I packed up my books and my meager other belongings and headed home to Texas, to Houston...
...Add to this the fact that the church's message is fundamentally a countercultural one, and thus a demanding one, and the problem of making the message understood is compounded...
...On the Sunday before school was to start, he mounted the pulpit at Mass and laid down the law...
...Especially, verse 40: "I assure you, as often as you did it for one of my least brothers, you did it for me...
...There is a room in my parents' house in Texas that several years ago I humorously took to calling "the colored museum...
...He went there alone in June 1954, to see whether he and the job and the people in charge would all find one another agreeable...
...But his words and his manner in those TV appearances suggested to me that this was no mere street thug...
...But scan the faces and you'll see only one dark face among them: mine...
...Hampton and Clark had been deliberately targeted and slain...
...And some is visceral, stemming from the conviction that the church has over the centuries fostered or tolerated anti-Semitism and various other kinds of bigotry and intolerance and therefore is not to be trusted...
...In one respect the story was very common to black people of that time...
...But that wasn't all of it...
...Wycliff, I don't see why your children can't go to school here...
...Highway 90...
...For his trouble he got a series of jobs that gave him inadequate pay and even less dignity...
...Francois was born ten months later in March 1943...
...it had been a shoot-in by the police...
...I awoke just before 7 a.m...
...I was going to be a teacher—a professor of political science...
...I try to go with the basics...
...Part of the purpose of our moving had been to get away from that sort of Jim Crow education...
...According to Eckenrode, Father Carroll announced that, starting that fall, there were going to be "colored children in our school...
...But in my opinion anti-Catholicism is a small obstacle compared with the ones that grow out of the Catholic Church itself...
...On the other, it meant our already overcrowded house would be even more crowded, as we made room for Sister Ambrose and whichever other nun accompanied her...
...Let me try to explain...
...A day or so later, Daddy got a call at work...
...Father Carroll went the extra mile...
Vol. 128 • December 2001 • No. 22
