In 1954, OLV was only taking children up to the second grade, and so
Joyce started second grade there, and to my surprise, my brother Ronald
started fourth grade, and I started third grade at Madonna and St. Paul (now
called Church of the Madonna Parish) on Oakman Boulevard. We were never
told that we would be repeating a grade. Neither one of us had ever failed any
of our subjects while attending Carver School. We boarded the chartered bus
waiting in front of the church each morning after Mass and we were bused
across town to our classes. Apparently, Madonna was the only Catholic school
that was accepting a bus load of black children.
I remember reading before I started kindergarten, around three or four
years of age. I did not know that there was something extraordinary in being
able to do that, yet I was put back a grade in order to attend Madonna school.
My brother was even smarter. It was wrong to be judged by the color of your
skin and the school you came from just because it did not meet the establishment’s
so-called standards. That was an insult to the educated teachers who
taught us.
With so many priest assigned to our church, there should be no surprise
that I found questionable reasons for low attendance at OLV School in the
archives. I fully recovered from the shock of seeing in writing that OLV students
had low IQs. Can you imagine what must have been said when all of us
landed at Madonna? I am sure the establishment must have been quite distressed
to see so many black youngsters descending on their school all at once.
Putting us back a grade may have been a way to discourage this attendance or
keep the numbers down.
I guess our parents were so desperate for us to get a good education that
they were willing to sacrifice us to get it. They never asked us how we felt
about it. I was so ashamed and humiliated by the experience that I wouldn’t
talk about it for years. As I started writing this book, I knew I had to come to
terms with my feelings, because I get butterflies in my stomach to this day just
thinking about what we went through. I discovered, however, that we were
not the only ones to experience this humiliation.
Third- and fourth-grades were added to OLV the following year, and I
began attending there. Madonna stopped taking the children of OLV, and
Ronald went to Our Lady of Sorrows in Detroit. The chartered bus was eliminated.
Anyway, I was not privy to enough inside information to question why
these things happened. Looking back, it all seems rather sad that my brother
and other students had to go to a Catholic school so far from home at such a
young age. I never really thought much about how he got there every day. Going to Madonna afforded us a chance to ride a chartered bus. After that
changed, families were on their own getting their children to a Catholic school
in the city of Detroit.
I suppose we had it better than the children before us, because Dolly said
that they had to go to Sacred Heart, which is near Gratiot Avenue and the
eastern market and had to catch several buses to get there. Some of the children
living on the east side of Wyoming in Royal Oak Township were fortunate
to go to St. James on Nine Mile Road. Public and private schools did not
accept the children living on the west side of Wyoming in the same township.
The high school children were bused to Northern High in Detroit before bussing
became a coined phrase and a controversial issue. When the bussing
ended, the Royal Oak Township parents had to get a court order to force Oak
Park Schools to accept their children.
We resided on the west side of Wyoming, and our mother did not want us
to be a part of that kind of rejection, so she took us out of the public school
system. Quite a few residents of the West Eight Mile Community took great
pains to get their children into good schools. It was very hard back then, so
people cherished a good education. Being very young had its good points …
you were not aware of the problems that you may have gone through, because
they were just too profound and too complex to comprehend. Youth has its
innocence and its protection.
I missed my brother very much when we had to go to separate schools.
When we were in public school, he had always looked out for us. Now we
were on our own. He started going to Our Lady of Sorrows on Meldrum in
Detroit, and I suppose he got with other children to get there. I remember it
being very popular for many of the teenagers to attend St. Leo High School,
and I wondered why. I found my answer in the OLV archives. Fr. Hubert
Roberge was transferred to St. Leo. It seems obvious now that the parents of
OLV followed him there. You see black children were not welcome at many
white parochial schools at that time. That has not changed very much over the
years, which is why saving OLV should have been a top priority.
I have heard repeatedly that you cannot force people to come into the
Catholic Church, but it worked for OLV because people wanted to be there.
Msgr. DeCneudt said, “Parents had to study the faith if they wanted their children to attend the school. They did not necessarily have to become Catholic,
but many of them did.”
The mixing of Catholic and non-Catholic children in inner city schools left
black Catholic parents in a dilemma: how to give their children the Catholic
education they remembered as children. I had Catholic friends who took their
children out of Presentation School and put them somewhere else, trying to
give them an education that they felt the children were lacking. I had non-
Catholic friends who put their children in Presentation looking for the same
thing. This has been going on for years. So consequently, the parish members
did not wholeheartedly support the school, and this created the necessity to
take in more non-Catholic children. Classrooms had to be filled somehow to
make them sustainable.
When I enrolled Clyde at Presentation, I thought he was going to have the
same wonderful experience I received. But in the eighties, things had changed
and not for the better, I might add. How out of touch I was, having been away
from church for a few years.
There were children of mixed faith attending when Clyde arrived. He was
taught by a brother, a nun, and lay teachers, so I was somewhat surprised that
he had to take religious education outside of class time, just like the public
school children had to do. I was also surprised that the parishioners did not
seem to have a stake in the school anymore. I realized how much I missed
while away and how crucial that information could be to the decisions I made
about how best to educate my child.
In recent years, Clyde told me that he had no good memories attending
Presentation—OLV School. I was very surprised and unprepared to hear this
and sad as well, because I tried so hard to give him a good basic education. I
remember getting a call at work from Mother, who was caring for him, telling
me to come home, because she was concerned about him. I got home as fast as
I could. We went into the bedroom, and he started crying, pouring his little
heart out about how the kids didn’t want to include him in basketball. He was
in the fourth grade, and I had just put him in the school, so he was the new
kid on the block. My heart just broke seeing him so distraught. While this
kind of thing goes on, it just never happened to my son, who was so outgoing
and personable for his age and who generally had no trouble making friends.
He was small for his age, and so he did have a few challenges to overcome, but
he was gutsy and could stand up to the best of them. I comforted him, gave
him lots of hugs and some advice, and we did get through this crisis.
The point of this story is to stress that a black parent should try to make
sure that there is a good fit with their children and the school they are attending.
In my case, it would have meant pulling my child out of Presentation—
OLV Catholic School. I know that some of my peers had done this. A
similar scene probably played out more frequently than one may think, which
may have contributed to the exodus of black Catholic children out of changing
Catholic schools in the city of Detroit.
I sent Clyde to the University of Detroit High School. At thirteen, he was
among the youngest and smallest children there. However, that did not stop
him from trying out for football. The coach refused to let him play, because he
was too small, and the possibility of injury was real. Clyde once told the coach,
“We would have won if you had let me play.” The coach was astounded at his
confidence and told me about it at a parent-teacher conference. The coach
always referred to him as “that little guy.” That’s the impression Clyde would
leave on people. He never ceases to amaze me, and I’m his mother. He was an
amazing youngster, so much like my brother in many ways.
Clyde transferred out of the U of D High in his sophomore year and graduated
from Oak Park High School in 1986. I did succeed in providing a basic
education for him, but only because I was an involved parent. But at what
cost? If I had it to do all over again, I would make sure that the school my
child attends is a good fit in every way. Because we had moved around a little,
I was not sure if he had even gotten the basics in elementary school, so I gave
him a test to find out if he had missed anything by asking a simple question.
“Which fraction is bigger, one-third or one-fourth?” He said, “one-third” and
I said, “Yes! You got it!” That is what it is all about, and what it has always
been about for black parents—paying some kind of price to get that education,
even unintentionally sacrificing our own children.
I graduated from OLV in June of 1960. Fr. Roberge attended and took a
photo of the first graduates on the church grounds. I had no idea who he was
and wondered over the years why he was in the class photo. I don’t know if we
were ever told about him, but I never knew much except what I had heard over
the years about his legacy. I certainly didn’t know him at our ceremony. Later,
I found his photo in the archives and compared it with our graduation picture.
Then his presence at our graduation made sense.
I realized even as a child that this event was a historic moment, and I did
wonder why Fr. DeCneudt was not there, sharing in our milestone. Maybe he
was overlooked. Nevertheless, for me there was a void left by him not being
there that day.
As much as I hated history in school, I always felt a fondness for it but not
on a conscious level. In reality, I loved it, only I didn’t know it. It would take
years for me to discover this. Confusing, isn’t it? That’s because the history I
was learning about was conflicted and contradictory, and there was nothing to
pique my interest.
On June 23, 1965, Fr. Edward O’Grady was appointed the administrator
of Our Lady of Victory. I was feeling detached from the church, and my
attendance became sporadic. When you are young and inexperienced, you are
already going through a confused state of mind, and seeing your church in
such turmoil does not help. It felt like everything around me was changing for
the worse, and that was very unsettling.
You see, I lost my brother, Lance Corporal Ronald L. Powell, to the Vietnam
War in August 1965. There was an explosion over the Hong Kong River,
and all seventy-five men aboard the plane he was on perished. He was in the
marines, and he received a military funeral at OLV and a twenty-one-gun
salute at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery. An article about him ran in the Detroit
News. I was devastated, and as they played “Taps,” my eyes flooded with tears.
I didn’t even know the priest who said the funeral Mass. I learned during the
research that it was Fr. Edward O’Grady.
The parish family rallied around us. We did not have to do anything. They
brought over food and took care of our mother. Two marines stood at attention
at our home and at Halls Funeral Home, guarding his casket. There was
no body—only a dog tag identifying his remains. This revelation so traumatized
me that I started sleepwalking and turning on the lights in our bedroom.
I also developed insomnia. Joyce told me that I got out of our bunk bed (I
slept on top), turned on the light, and then got back into bed. I found it hard
to believe, but stress will do a lot of things to the body.
From 1967 to 1970, Fr. Joseph Ferens, another priest I had no memories
of, was assigned to the parish. In 1968, I was engaged to be married. My
fiancé and I arrive for a meeting with this new priest, and he failed to keep the
appointment! I was mortified that we were stood up on one of the most
important days of my life.
I suppose he may have had a problem with the fact that I was pregnant.
Because of my condition, Mother was frantic and insisted that I go and see
him. This was my very first meeting with Fr. Ferens, and I was reluctant about
going. Once we finally did meet, he asked me, “What are your future plans?”
We had just gotten engaged, and so I said, “To get married and move in with
his parents until we are able to afford a place of our own.” Evidently he took
issue with those plans, because he muttered an unflattering remark, which was
racially biased, but I cannot recall it. I do remember getting up and leaving.
Ultimately, a minister in my fiancé’s faith married us. I am not trying to
paint what happened in a negative light. I am telling it from the perspective of
how I was personally affected by an administrator who didn’t know me at all,
and I didn’t know him. Prior to researching this, I couldn’t recall his name and
didn’t remember what he looked like.
I do know that my church lost something, and we were never able to get it
back. People were leaving. Most of my classmates were gone. The church of
my memories, that shaped me as a child, was dying a slow death. I was grieving
for a long time, devastated by the death of my brother and the slow death
of my church. It was a very bad time for me.
After getting married, I dropped out of the church altogether. At that time,
you were excommunicated if you married outside the faith. Eventually, I came
back divorced and with a small child. The Catholic Church was all I knew.
My life was a mess for a while, because I had lost my direction and was disillusioned
by what I thought was a Christian, God-fearing, faith-filled church.
Unfortunately, we held priests to a higher standard, and we set ourselves up
for a letdown.
My life was a lesson in contradictions. I was told that I had to get an annulment
before I could remarry. Why would you annul a marriage that had produced
a child? I disagreed with that advice. I had to find a single man who had
no marriage in his history before I could be married in the Catholic Church.
How many single, black, Catholic men can you find in the city of Detroit?
What were they thinking when they gave me this advice? Although I did
manage to meet a number of single men, not all of them were marriage material,
and they certainly were not Catholic.
Most of my Catholic girlfriends didn’t fare much better. The problem with
all of these rules was that they did not apply very well to the black community.
We had a whole set of social problems and issues that the white establishment
was not prepared to deal with or even acknowledge. I say this because if they
had kept our church open and helped it to flourish, maybe I would have had a
choice of marrying a Catholic and would not have had these issues to deal
with. If I had followed their rules, I would have had to remain single. We have
enough single parents in the black community already. I chose to stay away
longer until the rules changed. Eventually they did. There was a big ceremony
at Blessed Sacrament Cathedral forgiving all the fallen Catholics in one
swoop. I did not attend the ceremony. I was questioning everything at that
time.
Langston (my present husband of twenty-four years) and I eventually
renewed our vows at Presentation—OLV Church. Fr. Ed Scheurmann—a
priest who was there only for the year 2000—performed the ceremony. We
went through Fr. Kenneth Stewart who was the presiding priest, to file the
proper papers. By the time the papers were approved, the archdiocese mistakenly
sent them to Fr. Stewart in Chicago where he had transferred during the
process. Even the archdiocese has a hard time keeping up with the revolving
door of priests in and out of the parish. Otherwise they would have known
that Fr. Stewart was transferred from the parish and the paperwork should not
have gone to Chicago. Fr. Stewart promptly sent the papers back to Fr.
Scheurmann, who performed the ceremony.
Around the mid nineties, I joined the Knights of St. Peter Claver Ladies
Auxiliary, Presentation—Our Lady of Victory Court #189 and was treasurer
for nearly eight years. I did not know of OLV’s history with the Claver organization,
because my parents were not involved in it during my childhood. My
mother joined years later after the council reestablished itself in 1977. My
research efforts and involvement as chairperson of the History Committee
gave me the opportunity to learn about the council/court’s rich history and
humble beginnings at OLV.
I also had an opportunity to chaperone the Junior Daughters at their division
conference in the spring of 2003 and was very impressed with the large
turnout of black Catholic families. Mothers, fathers, and their children made
the organization a family affair filling up a large block of the Birmingham,
Alabama, hotel where we stayed. The southern hospitality was so refreshing. I
had never seen so many black Catholics in one place in my life.
The Knights of St. Peter Claver has its roots in Alabama spreading to Louisiana,
Texas, and many states throughout the country, and the organization is
entrenched in the Catholic way of life. I was very impressed seeing fathers
spending time with their sons as I took the girls in my charge swimming in the
hotel pool.
Over the years, through people, and through this research project, I have
learned of the black Catholic Church’s strong presence in the southern states
and the prominent role of the Knights of St. Peter Claver National in preserving
that presence throughout the United States.
Both of my parents have passed on, and today, I am the only one left in my
family who is a practicing Catholic. The next generation seems to have
decided not to participate. Whose fault is it? One thing is certain, we cannot
know where we are going if we don’t know where we have been.
Next week Part II, The Pioneers
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