Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Loyola College, Timonium

Loyola College’s Teaching Workshop:

“If the Year of the City Is Done Well, What Will Loyola Learn from Baltimore?”

Good morning.  Thank you for the opportunity to address today’s teacher workshop.  Although I didn’t graduate from Loyola College, I feel some affinity because I graduated from Loyola High School in Towson, a couple of years after Jacques Kelly and exactly ten years after Loyola High graduated its first African American student ever, Ken Montague.  Ken is currently the state’s Secretary for Juvenile Justice.  But perhaps I’ll talk about that more later.

We’ve been asked to address the question, “If the Year of the City is done well, what can Loyola learn from Baltimore?”  But first, speaking of learning, “I’m reminded of a story of a young Baptist minister, who having gained fame and fortune in the North, was asked to come home, South, to deliver a sermon. Well he could hardly refuse!  So he decided to take his young son along with him, to teach him something about his history, his culture. Well, he went down there and he delivered the sermon of his life; he had the congregation rolling from one emotion to the next.  When he was finished, his old pastor came up to him and said, “John, that was a mighty fine sermon, the finest sermon I’ve heard in a very long time.  I wish we could give you something, but we’re just a small congregation.”  John waved off the old pastor and said it was payment enough just being home. 

As he’s leaving the church, John notices there’s a poor box in the back.  He reaches into his wallet, pulls out a fresh, new crisp $10 bill and puts it in the collection box.

Halfway across the parking lot with his son, he hears a voice, “John! ...  John!”  (It’s the voice of his old pastor).  “Now, John, as I said, we wish we could really give you a proper gift but we just don’t have it.  But we’d like to give you a small “token” of our appreciation.”  And with those words, he hands John the crisp new $10 bill that John recognizes as the one he put in the poor box.

Traveling home, he decides to test his son.  He says to his little brown-eyed five year old, “Son, there’s a lesson here.”  And the innocent faced boy looks up at him and says, ”I know” “Well, what is it son?”  And the little boy says, “If you had given more, you would have gotten more!”

And that’s the first lesson we can learn from our Year of the City — Baltimore experience.  As Memphis blues musician, WC Handy once said about his trumpet, what you get out of if depends on what you put into it. 

When the year of the city is over, if it were done well, we will have learned three things about Baltimore and therefore ourselves:

• There is a lot of poverty in Baltimore City among its 636,000 residents and it is structural.
  

• Race relations are as strained here as they are anywhere else in America and that’s been a problem historically and

• Baltimore has produced some of the better known civil rights activists anyway: Mother Mary Lange, founder of the Oblate Sisters of Providence, Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and advisor to Abraham Lincoln, Thurgood Marshall, the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court (born and bred in Baltimore), Clarence and Juanita Jackson Mitchell, great leaders of the NAACP in its heyday… W.E.B. DuBois, one of the founders of the NAACP lived here for a while and Zora Neale Hurston, the noted author of “Their Eyes Were Watching God” graduated from then Morgan State College.  So, again, Baltimore’s had a rich civil rights history which will be good to remember, as Loyola tries to figure on its contribution in the years after the Year of the City.

The poverty in Baltimore is like poverty everywhere in America and the rest of the world: invisible and rarely talked about, so little is done about it.  There were some spotlights on the issue after Hurricane Katrina and some retrospectives now, a year later.  But little to nothing has been done since Katrina to eliminate poverty … promises made …  but we’re still waiting.

The poverty in Baltimore City is as bad as the poverty in New Orleans.  Some telling statistics: 

• There are 200,000 unemployed people out of the 636,000 whom live here…

• One out of every three children in the city lives below the poverty line. 

• Over 38% of the adult population in the city can’t read beyond the fifth grade level…

• There are 60,000 drug addicts…

• 100,000 thousand arrests in the city each year…

• There are tens of thousands of Baltimoreans without health issue, who do not own a car, or who cannot afford the cheap rent we have for some of the cheapest housing in the region, according to a recent Johns Hopkins study. 

• The minimum wage is now $6.15 an hour in Maryland but that only gets you just over $12,000. 

• The federal poverty line is $20,000 for a family of four. 

• The schools are struggling to get better as they’ve struggled for years and while the children are still waiting…

• We spend fully $1 billion a year on the 88,000 children in the Baltimore City public school system to get the limited, mixed results we get…

So that’s why I say the poverty is structural…

There’s an invisible poor house on the grounds of the bigger house known as Baltimore, built of limited to no access to quality education, good jobs that pay living wages, health care, public transportation, decent affordable housing in sound neighborhoods… 

Too many residents of the poor house can’t find the door out because they can’t read, have criminal records, are drug addicted or can’t find a job. 

We have a very weak public transportation system with limited access to jobs in the surrounding counties, too few training and placement opportunities and too little political will or moral outrage to change things for the better. 

In the African American version of the Wizard of Oz, known as the Wiz, the original Michael Jackson sings a song lyric that best describes the situations of the residents of Baltimore’s poor house: “You can’t win. You can’t get even and you can’t get out of the game.” 

That’s structural poverty:  schools are too bad for you to study your way out of it… public transportation is so bad you can’t ride your way to a better job and thus out of poverty… jobs pay to little to work your way out of it and there’s a chance you have a criminal record, poor health, illiteracy or drug addiction working against you, And to top it all off: you’re invisible. 

The second thing that we will have learned, if the year of the city is done well, is that we’ve got a long way to go to have good race relations in Baltimore. 

Let me give you some examples:  Baltimore City is the oldest Catholic diocese in the nation.  This diocese ordained its first Catholic priest in 1974 (Father Donald Sterling current pastor of New All Saints Church in Northwest Baltimore).  It ordained its second priest about a week later in the person of then Father Maurice Blackwell.  It ordained its third and last Black Catholic priest, Father Ray Harris, in 1993 or so.  Prior to 1974, men of color who wanted to be priests had to leave Baltimore City to pursue seminary life and to become priests.  Another example, is the religious order I work for, the Oblate Sisters of Providence, the first community of religious women of African descent in the world. 

Elizabeth Clarisse Lange, later Mother Lange, with three other women wanted to become nuns but was denied the opportunity by the existing religious orders.  Working with a Sulpician priest, Father Nicholas Joubert, they eventually applied to Rome and were approved to start their own religious order in 1829, the Oblate Sisters of Providence.  With Rome’s approval, essentially racial segregation was endorsed.  And until the 1970s there were still religious orders that did not admit persons of color. 

Black folks went to separate Catholic schools, such as St. Frances Academy, sat in the back of churches during Mass and were buried in the back and down the hill in the Catholic New Cathedral Cemetery.  The Jesuits admitted the first Black kid to their high school in 1956 (two years after the Brown Supreme Court decision of 1954 that struck down segregation in schools)… and much to the consternation of one of their biggest benefactors — the Blake family.  Racism was an ugly part of our history…  its vestiges remain with us …

I would maintain that racism is the mortar that keeps the poorhouse standing. The public schools are majority Black and not being fixed fast enough… the public transportation system is used mostly by persons of color and continues to drag on… most of the arrests are of blacks who populate most of the jails, while the overwhelming majority of the police officers making the arrests are white… 

Most of the many non-profit organizations in Baltimore are headed by white persons and most of the client bases of those organizations are majority Black.  

We have a white mayor of a city that is 67% Black for two reasons: one, because he “smartly” ran between two mediocre Black candidates to win in 1999 and two because too many white folks still don’t vote for Black candidates when the curtains to the voting booth are closed. 

And how much business does the Archdiocese of Baltimore and the rest of the Catholic community do with African American companies in Baltimore?  Very little, I’d say…

If we learn that race is still an issue in Baltimore, we will have learned a lot.  But we never talk about race (just as we never talk about poverty).  Perhaps it’s because the two issues are inextricably involved.  But the noted author, James Baldwin, said it best, “Not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

But the third thing we can learn is very hopeful: this city has a rich history of producing strong, gifted women and men of change.  We would do well to learn about:  Mother Mary Lange and the struggles of the Oblate Sisters of Providence, Frederick Douglass, who helped Abraham Lincoln write the Gettysburg Address, but who lived in Fells Point while the Oblates were getting St. Frances Academy started down there and who grew to be the best known abolitionist of his time.  Thurgood Marshall grew up in West Baltimore near Union Baptist and Bethel AME Churches… he later lawyered the Brown case before the Supreme Court and won and sat on the Supreme Court himself as its first African American.   W.E. B. DuBois is one of the founders of the Niagara Movement that eventually became the NAACP… his granddaughter attended St. Frances Academy.  He, too, lived in Baltimore for a while …

Elizabeth Seton lived here.  She was the foundress of the Catholic parochial school system in America… The Mitchell family, the First Family of the civil rights movement was from here: Juanita Jackson Mitchell, Clarence Mitchell, Jr.  (whose son went to Gonzaga because Loyola wouldn’t admit him)… Parren Mitchell, the first Black Congressman in Maryland is from Baltimore…  the Murphy family is also a prominent civil rights family, founders of the African American Newspaper.  The 2nd largest NAACP chapter (after New York) was in Baltimore during the biggest, best, most productive days of that organization. 

A lesser known civil rights activist in Baltimore was a fellow named Walter P. Carter who coordinated Maryland’s contingent to the March on Washington in 1963 which was the largest delegation to hear King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.  Carter later became an advisor to the Jesuits on race and other social matters.  He also taught at Loyola College while he assisted the Jesuit Provincial.

These folks give us hope.  Baltimore has a lot of great amenities, beautiful neighborhoods and fine people.  But Baltimore needs a lot of work, especially in eliminating the economic gap between the rich and the poor… and the power divide between persons of color and whites.

We must take inspiration from the vision and courage of the freedom fighters I mentioned earlier.  We must stand shoulder to shoulder with the poor and persons of color in their struggles.  We must speak out against injustice and work hard for change.  We must stand on the moral high ground and break the silence.  We must do what we can from wherever we sit to share the wealth. 

I learned in the classroom in my nine years of instruction with the Oblate Sisters of Providence that I should get a good education and come back to the inner-city to help out.  I was taught service along with reading, writing and arithmetic…  Then the Sisters sent me to the Jesuits. They taught me that the end goal of a quality education is service to others.  After my Jesuit education, I strived to be a “Brother for Others”.  I received a lot of direction, inspiration and motivation through my contact with Catholics: the Oblates, the Jesuits and the Josephite Fathers and Brothers…  So despite some of the sordid history, I encountered dedicated, courageous, caring Catholics who helped shape and form me.

But these “neurotic and confused times” as Walter P. Carter called them… require strong clear words and action.  If we learn anything, we should learn that we are faced with a great opportunity to honor God and to honor some great modern prophets who’ve walked our Baltimore streets.  If we learn anything, we must learn that we have a moral obligation to make life better for all — to break down the barriers of race and economic status that divide us. 

If we learn anything in this year of the city, let it be that silence and complacency are false virtues not worthy of any of us.  Thank you.

Ralph E. Moore, Jr.

8/29/06