Some of My Best Friends Are Black

by Tanner Colby

  If the white church were the only workable option, a gesture was necessary to prove that blacks would not enter this new parish as second-class citizens, and so Knight proposed a compromise. At the time, Sacred Heart happened to be in need of a paint job and extensive repairs. Knight proposed that they take the opportunity to remodel the interior and make it into a shared space. The side chapel that had once served as the colored section was separated from the main congregation by a separate altar and pulpit. They would tear out that altar and pulpit and move the side pews to join the main congregation—they would lop off the back of the bus, and no one would ever have to sit there again. “Let us make it a new church for a new parish,” Knight said, “a church that will be what it is by the labor of black and white alike.”

  Knight’s proposal was enough for the black council members to go along, despite their reservations. On November 8, 1971, in a show of unity, a black council member made the motion to accept the white church as their new, permanent home. Another black parishioner seconded the motion. The entire council, white and black, voted unanimously for its passage. Then they announced the plans to the rest of parish.

  “And that’s when everything broke loose,” Charlie Thibodeaux says.

  If Catholics get upset when mass gets moved by half an hour, that goes double for moving the furniture. The reactionary faction of the white congregation met the renovation plan with outrage. Nobody had told them that they’d actually have to, you know, make some sacrifices from their end to move this along. Share a phone line and a bingo night? Fine. Some Global Village thing once a week for the hippies? Sure. But make changes to their own church and help pay for it besides?

  Hell, no.

  Father Knight found his plan stymied at every turn. He was blackballed by every contractor in the phone book. “There wasn’t a single carpenter in town who would touch that church,” Knight says. “So I finally told everyone that if they wouldn’t renovate it, I’d do it myself. I said, ‘I’ll go in there Monday morning with a hammer and a crowbar and I’ll tear out that woodwork! I’ll destroy it! Then you’ll have no excuse.’”

  But Knight never got the chance to do any demolition. Just as the dispute was coming to a head, his mother fell ill; he took leave that December to be with her. Which was just as well. Several dozen families, black and white, had already left the parish. More were poised to follow. Going after the altar with a crowbar probably wouldn’t have helped. “They got me out of there at just the right time,” he admits with hindsight. “I’m not always very bright.” After his mother’s funeral, Knight was transferred to a parish in New Orleans. He never went back to St. Charles Borromeo.

  After Knight’s departure, Charlie Thibodeaux assumed the responsibilities of pastor. In March of 1972, after consulting with an architect on the steps needed to do the remodeling, the parish council voted, again, to move forward. And then the backlash got nasty. Digging through the parish archives, I found more letters about the proposed 1972 renovation than I did pertaining to any other subject in the parish’s 190-year history. White parishioners flooded the bishop’s office with petitions. Removing the side altar was “a tragedy” and “a desecration.” It left the churchgoers “sick” and “depressed.” The renovation was being done “out of spite.” It was “revenge” and “retribution” against the whites. Never mind that the black council members had just voted to forfeit their own church in its entirety, these whites were being asked to give up three, maybe four pieces of eighty-year-old cabinetry, and that kind of injustice was simply not going to stand.

  Given the progress the parish had made in just two years, it almost seems like a bad joke that the whole thing would fall apart over a plan to move around a few wooden benches. But that’s what happened. Knight’s compromise was sound in theory, but in execution it fell victim to one of integration’s classic blunders. It gave white people their out. It made the argument about something other than race, something that whites could whine about. You can’t move our pews. I don’t want my kid to ride the bus. In the dozens of letters fired off to the bishop, most of them make no mention of race at all. Insofar as they do, most of them have “no problem” with blacks, and “support” integration. They just oppose the one thing that would actually allow integration to take place.

  Putting cabinetry on a higher moral plane than the unity of God’s children was foolishness, but the whole episode laid bare the crux of the integration dilemma. Even if you’re on the right side of history, how far can you push people before you’re doing more harm than good? The whites were willing to go to war over the woodwork, and in doing so destroy what progress had been made. The two parishes had become one, in a way. The biracial council worked well together. A few dozen blacks attended weekend mass at the white church and were received, if not with open arms, at least with civility. A handful of whites also went without complaint to weekday services at the black church. Grand Coteau had traveled a great distance since Wallace Belson, and perhaps that was enough for now.

  Charlie Thibodeaux decided that it was. The bishop had replied to the deluge of letters with a terse statement saying that the renovations were minimal and everyone should get over it. But Thibodeaux had a better feel for what the parish was thinking and how much more it would take. He shelved the renovation plan. “Charlie was an extraordinary man,” Father Knight says of his successor. “I honestly believe he was a saint. He kept it from becoming violent. If I’d pushed for that renovation, if I’d gone in there and touched that church, we might have had violence. Or who knows what. It would have been stupid of me. But he had the prudence and the gentleness that I lacked.”

  Thibodeaux served as pastor for a short while longer. Then he wound his way south of the border to work at his mission in Paraguay under the brutal dictatorship of strongman Alfredo Stroessner, where, presumably, the political climate was easier on his nerves. He has been there ever since. Father Knight left the Jesuits some years later and now works as a diocesan priest in Memphis, Tennessee. The failure of the whites to make any meaningful compromise was proof to the reticent black congregants that they had been right all along. Unifying the churches was a losing proposition. So the whites held on to their cabinetry and the blacks held on to their building. Both retreated into their own churches, and that’s where they stayed.

  From that day forward, St. Charles Borromeo was integrated in much the same way that America was integrated—on paper. This odd duck, this single parish with two congregations, became the new status quo. To differentiate between them, officially, what had been Sacred Heart became known as “the church” and what had been Christ the King was now called “the chapel.” In casual conversation, however, you were more likely to hear them called by their unambiguous possessives: their church and our church. The phones all rang to one office. The business was all done on the same stationery. The collection plates all went into the same kitty. But socially and spiritually, Sunday morning at eleven o’clock was still the most segregated hour of the week, and it would remain that way for some time. As one parishioner put it, “You have to go through Good Friday to get to Easter, and we went through an awful lot of Good Fridays.”

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  In the Wilderness

  Nearly every time I sit down to talk with someone in Grand Coteau about the history of the parish, he or she will eventually, inevitably, lean forward to say, “Well, you know, there was a black man tried to go to the white church back in ’64…”

  Wallace Belson casts a long shadow over the town’s conscience, but the man himself is no longer here. He passed in the mid-1990s. The closest living source to the incident is his son, Wallace Belson, Jr., now in his late sixties. When I finally reach the younger Belson by telephone to ask about the integration of the churches, he’s fairly candid about his feelings on the matter.

  “I ain’t swallowed it right yet,” he says.

  Still, he’s happy to talk and invites me over to his home, a modest brick ranch house just a few blocks fr
om the church. Belson’s mother has passed on, too, and his wife. But he has two daughters, one a nurse and one a teacher. Today, he works as the head of Grand Coteau’s volunteer fire department, but he spent many years as a cook over at the Jesuit novitiate. He’s got a stocky build, solid for a man of his age, but his shoulders are stooped a bit, and one of his eyelids hangs slightly lower than the other. Even when he’s smiling he comes across as a bit weary. Overall he gives the impression of a man who’s been struggling against gravity his whole life, which he has.

  Like Charlie Thibodeaux, Belson was driven to act by what was done to his father, but Matthew 25 was the last thing on his mind. “When they beat him in the church,” Belson says, “the pastor, he looked the other way. Just a nigger got whipped. That was it. I’ll be honest with you—and I’m not proud to say this—after they did that to my daddy, two Sundays straight I went over to that church for mass. I was ready. I wanted them to do it to me. I wanted them to beat me, whip me, kick me, spit on me.”

  “So they’d give you the excuse to fight back?” I ask.

  “Oh, no,” he says. “I wasn’t gonna fight. I was gonna do something worse than that, you know what I’m sayin’? There wasn’t gonna be no fightin’, no sir. And I know God’s gonna punish me for going into church like that. I went there thinkin’ the same way those white men were thinkin’, with hate. I went there like an animal.”

  No one ever assaulted Wallace Belson, Jr., and he never assaulted anyone in return. But when the drive for integration stalled in 1972, Belson became—and would remain—a vocal part of the faction that was glad to see it die.

  By 1977, it had. That was the year that Darrell Burleigh started working at St. Charles Borromeo as parish manager. Burleigh looks like the kind of old-time Cajun you’d see in a tourism commercial, a full head of white hair, his face heavily creased with age, his thick Louisiana accent peppered with colloquial French. Thanks to a bad back, today he’s propped up on a pillow in a creaky, old wooden chair, sitting at his paper-strewn desk in the rectory office. Perched at this same desk for the last thirty-plus years, he’s spent a lifetime on the color line, negotiating all the business between their church and our church.

  “In the earlier years,” Burleigh says, “it was civil. But don’t bring up anything pertaining to the chapel versus the church. Phew! Everything would blow up. From the get-go, it was my dream that we could just have one St. Charles Parish, but every time a new pastor would come, he’d say, ‘We need to bring that chapel over here. That’s the only way we’ll make integration work.’

  “Then word would get around and people would start gettin’ all riled up. One time, somebody came to me. Down he sits and says, ‘The pastor talks like that, he better have his bags packed.’

  “I say, ‘Packed for what?’

  “He says, ‘Anybody tries to close that chapel, he won’t be here a week.’

  “Then the next pastor would come along, then the next one, and then the next one.”

  All told, beginning with Father Knight, thirteen pastors would come and go before the black and white parishioners of Grand Coteau sat together as one. In the 1980s, one priest suffered a nervous breakdown over the matter. As the years went by, tensions did begin to ease up. Younger black families had started coming more and more to services at the white church, but it was still a “white” church—Anglo-European in tone with lots of blue-eyed, blond-haired dead people on the walls. The chapel up the road, meanwhile, had grown only more entrenched in its separateness. It was in the winter of 1993 that Pastor No. 9, Father William Rimes (now deceased) and his associate, Father Warren Broussard, decided it was time for the work of integration to be completed.

  “When I got to St. Charles,” Father Broussard says, “all of the liturgies were fairly well integrated at the main church. The four p.m. vigil mass was the least integrated because it was mostly older people, but the family masses were almost fifty-fifty black and white. To me, that part of it was going pretty well. Most of the white community, and probably a good percentage of the African-American community, felt that it was pointless to continue the separation, but the group in the chapel had become even more removed. I tried to be sensitive to their feelings, but at the same time it seemed so unhealthy—separate but equal, only it wasn’t equal.”

  Lent was approaching. Since the parishioners would be rededicating their faith to the church, the pastors felt it made sense to have them also rededicate their efforts to unification. Rimes and Broussard wrote to Bishop Harry Flynn, proposing to close the chapel during the seven Sundays of the Lent and Easter season. If all went well, they would do it again during Advent and Christmas. “Worship together during the major liturgical seasons,” the priests wrote, “will stand as symbol and example of the better union of minds and hearts which we all should seek.” As a practical note, they added, the cost of mounting separate seasonal celebrations at both churches was proving to be a significant strain on parish resources; consolidating the observances would save a good deal of money. The bishop agreed.

  For seven Sundays that Lent, the chapel was closed and the black and white congregations worshiped together, completely together, for the first time in decades. The first Sunday after Easter, however, the black congregation went straight to the pastors to make sure the chapel would be reopened. Come December, everyone worshipped together for Advent and Christmas. Again, the chapel was back open before you could say Happy New Year. When the 1994 Lenten season came around, the priests went to proceed with what they hoped would become an annual tradition and a prelude to unification. Only this Lent, instead of Wallace Belson trying to get into the white church, Wallace Belson was trying to get out.

  If a church had done to my father what Sacred Heart did to Wallace Belson’s father, I can’t say I’d ever set foot in that church, or any church, ever again. And if a white man had been assaulted at the black church in 1964? Forget it. That church would have been burned to the ground. Yet Belson remains a devout Catholic. He’s one of Grand Coteau’s most dedicated and active parishioners. He considered leaving. He was wooed by his Protestant friends, took some literature from the Nation of Islam, but in the end he came back home. “I’m not gonna change my religion because of somebody else,” he says. “I’m a Catholic, and I’ll die a Catholic. All the money I spent giving my daughters a Catholic education, if I had it today you know where I’d be? In the Bahamas, every summer.” Belson’s devotion to the parish, however, has been almost entirely in service of the chapel alone. As an officer in the Knights of Peter Claver,* for decades he’s volunteered hours and hours each week to keep Grand Coteau’s black congregation thriving and to keep it separate.

  After Martin Luther King died, his civil rights gospel of passive, peaceful reconciliation no longer held the universal appeal it once did. Black Christian leaders had to refute claims like those Malcolm X had made, that they were peddling “the white man’s religion.” The black church needed a new narrative—it needed a new brand, one with an aspirational marketing strategy for a newly assertive and Afrocentric generation.

  Black liberation theology was born out of this era, marrying the militance of Black Power with the Gospel teachings of Jesus. God’s only son was a fervent partisan for the oppressed and the poor, and because the oppressed and the poor in America were black, it followed that Christ himself was black—literally or metaphorically, depending on whom you ask. This was not the Jesus who turned the other cheek, but the one who cast the money changers out of the temple. Like the Israelites of old, in the American paradigm, blacks were God’s Chosen People. It was their divinely appointed task to emancipate Christianity from the white supremacist ideology that had corrupted it, and in doing so, liberate themselves as well. In the church, as in politics and in business, the path to the Promised Land lay in ethnic solidarity and self-sufficiency, challenging the white power structure from a position of strength rather than accommodating it from a position of weakness.

  Though mostly rooted in certai
n Protestant denominations, black liberation theology would make its influence felt even within the rigid, top-down orthodoxy of Roman Catholicism, where it would be recast through a uniquely Catholic lens: the One True Church would be a universal church for humankind (i.e., would truly be catholic) only when it accepted its black members in a full and equal embrace. The black clergy and the black Catholic laity began organizing, making demands straight out of the Black Power playbook: that more black parishes be established to serve black communities, that only black priests be assigned to those parishes, and that they be given direct authority over the affairs of black congregations.

  The Catholic hierarchy did what it could to meet many of these demands—and not simply due to political pressure. For the first time in America’s history, the church began making a sincere effort to give black Catholics their due. Most every diocese with a significant black representation opened a dedicated office for black Catholic affairs. (Lafayette established its office of Black Catholic Ministries in 1973.) In the 1980s, a national African-American Catholic Youth Conference was formed. More black clergy were recruited and promoted to positions of real authority; Atlanta would welcome the country’s first black archbishop in 1988.

  The mass began changing, too. Following the acculturation directives of Vatican II, black parishes began incorporating more traditional African and black American customs into their liturgy. By the late 1980s, it wasn’t unusual to walk into a black Catholic church and see a gospel choir decked out in Kente cloth robes and hear the call-and-response of “Amen, brother” coming up from the pews. By creating and supporting a “black Catholic” experience, these programs succeeded in retaining many black congregants and in bringing earlier defectors back to the faith. There was only one problem: the church had already tried this tactic once before, in New Orleans in 1895.