by Tanner Colby
Madden went to the black parishioners to ask for their cooperation, but he also made it clear that, financially, there really wasn’t an option. A few complaints were raised, but “not even very many,” Madden says. The black congregation gave its blessing. On June 13, 2004, a brief announcement was placed in the church bulletin. The chapel would be closed and converted into classrooms, the seven-thirty mass would be held at the main church from now on, and… and that was it. Piece of cake. On the appointed day, the chapel renovations began. The black parishioners came to pack up the artwork and some keepsakes. They saved the woodwork, too. The handmade pews that their fathers and grandfathers had built were taken out, one by one, and carried off to find new purpose on patios and back porches.
Given the anger of the protest just two years before, it seems bizarre that the end would come so quietly. It’s almost a nonstory, an anticlimax. But if you take the long view, it’s easy to understand what happened here. David Knight and Charlie Thibodeaux took a sledgehammer to the problem for years and years and barely made a crack. But people kept after it, slowly chipping away. Warren Broussard sanded down the edges. Dave Andrus and Charles James took out a few chunks. Hurricane Lili gave it a good whack. And with decades of patience, diligence, dialogue, and compromise, the roots of Jim Crow had grown so weak that a seventy-eight-year-old man was able to knock the whole thing over with a feather. That is the Miracle of Grand Coteau.
Once the two congregations were joined, no one really knew what to expect. Among white parishioners, there remained a great deal of reluctance and indifference. In the black congregation, many of the age-old worries persisted. Not everyone felt as comfortable as Charles James, who’d been coming to the big church for some time. “There were still some people,” he says, “every chance they got they would talk about ‘our church’ and what it was like in ‘our church.’ And it got on my nerves really bad. I recall this one lady said to me, ‘Well, you know they’re not going to let us do the things that we were doing in the chapel. They’re not going to let us do this, and they’re not going to let us do that…’
“I said, ‘What do you mean let you? This is your church, too. If you were doing them in the chapel, how can they not let you do them here? So those fears are your own. All we need to do is just keep doing what we were doing before.’”
The migration was not without compromise, but many of the chapel’s traditions made the move intact. Indeed, much of the accommodation had to come from the white side of the aisle. Since the parish had no Knights of Columbus chapter, the Knights of Peter Claver migrated to become the church’s principal service organization. Once the bastion of the anti-integration holdouts, the group has since taken on white members. In every pew, you’ll also find copies of Lead Me, Guide Me: The African-American Catholic Hymnal. The songbook’s Kente cloth cover sits right there beside Francesco Furini’s Annunciation, the fifteenth-century Italian Baroque painting on the seasonal missalette.
Lead Me, Guide Me is there because the chapel’s gospel choir came directly over to the new seven-thirty mass, which left one white parishioner, Andre Douget, without a choir. A divorce attorney from Lafayette, Douget has attended mass at St. Charles Borromeo since about 1995. He and his wife have a weekend home nearby. Rather than commute back to the city for church every Sunday, they come here. Douget used to sing in the Sunday choir at the nine-thirty service, but when the churches merged, that mass got pushed an hour back, to ten thirty—too late for Douget, who, like many Cajuns, prefers to spend his Sundays in the kitchen. So he started going to the seven-thirty mass. But the gospel choir, Douget felt, wasn’t his to join. As a bespectacled, fortysomething white guy, he didn’t imagine he’d be a particularly good fit. “I’d sit up front and sing,” he says, “but only as part of the regular congregation.”
Eventually, some members of the choir heard him singing every week and asked him to join. Not surprisingly, one of those who approached Douget was Charles James. “Andre told me he felt some people might not appreciate it,” James says, “but I told him, ‘Just get your ass over there.’”
Douget was right, however: not every black member of the choir was on board with the idea. “It wasn’t tense,” James admits, “but some people weren’t so open to it. But Andre is the kind of person that brings an open spirit and an open heart to the situation, and he’s educating them. He’s educating those people who may not be able to understand that it just doesn’t matter. It’s all foolishness. Andre’s a parishioner, period.”
It’s now been three years since Douget joined the choir. Whatever objections existed within the group have long disappeared. He’s been known to take a solo every now and then, and he’s even got a nickname. “They call me Creamy,” he says. “We’re way past the welcome stage. I’m just a member of the choir. We joke about it a lot.
“They laugh at me, too, for trying to get soul. I can read music, and so if it’s a quarter note I want to sing a quarter note. I always try to sing the songs the way they’re written in the book. They could throw the book away. They sing it the way they’ve been taught. Whenever a new song comes up in practice, if it’s not in the hymnal, I’m like, ‘Anybody got the words? Who has the words?’ Because they don’t pass along sheet music; it’s traditional music that’s been passed down generation to generation, and they all just know it.
“The best I can explain it is that they sing from the heart, and I sing from the book. That’s the best I can describe it. And one of the first things you have to learn is to let go of that book.”
James and Douget have since become close friends, dinner out with their wives, getting together for Sunday barbecue—which is a rare enough occurrence in these parts that it still gets noticed. “Some folks are a little critical of it,” James says. “They’ll use those age-old words on you—white-man lover, stuff like that. They never say that to me, but it’s being said. But that’s got nothing to offer. I don’t pay it any attention. Andre’s good people. It’s getting to the point where, I guess, you have to be able to be free in your own skin. Andre is free in his own skin. He is who he is, and I’ve got no problems with who I am, either.”
Prior to coming to St. Charles, though, Andre wasn’t always so at ease with these things. “I grew up in a little town called Basile,” Douget says, “which to this day is pretty segregated. My grandparents were—I’m not going to call them racist, but they were certainly prejudiced. And for me St. Charles is a constant reminder to banish how I grew up as a child. I can’t let myself be that way, because there are faces associated with that now. You’re not just talking about a black person, you’re talking about my friend Charles, who sings next to me. Or Helen—Helen who gives me grief because I can never get the dress code right as to when we’re supposed to wear the black shirts opposed to the white shirts.
“To this day I know prejudiced people, but now I find that I don’t tolerate racial slurs being used around me, and I just choose not to be around people who harbor those views. And isn’t that actually the call of the church? Not to just be this way on Sunday, but to incorporate that into my life the rest of the week?”
The changes in this town are indeed moving beyond the Sunday service and into people’s weekly lives, albeit slowly. Perhaps the most noticeable differences have come through Grand Coteau’s community outreach organization, the Thensted Center. Established in 1982, supported by the parish and staffed by the Sacred Heart sisters, the center is named for Father Cornelius Thensted, a beloved local priest who worked tirelessly among the poor in this area during the Great Depression. Julia Richard—the young black woman who marched up to the front pews of the white church back in 1970—now serves as the program’s director.
Since the integration of the churches took place, the biggest change Richard has seen at the Thensted Center is that she’s actually seen white people at the Thensted Center. “Ten years ago,” she says, “there wasn’t a white person who would come here for anything. People were still stuck on the fact tha
t this center is for poor people and the only people who are poor are black. But people are starting to see past that now.
“One of the more integrated events we have is our seniors’ day. They come in for lunch and activities every other Friday. When I was growing up here as a girl, we would walk up the street to school in the morning, and the whites who lived in the houses on that road would open their doors and sic their dogs on us, just to let them chase us up the street. Now we have the elderly whites coming here, and some of them are the same people who turned the dogs after you. They’re sitting in here every other Friday enjoying a senior citizens’ day, together. That’s a big move. And they did it on their own. It wasn’t like the chapel where they closed it and told everyone they had to be together. Here, they come, and they all sit and laugh and talk.
“They don’t always sit together, at first,” she adds. “I notice when the whites come in they all sit in the same little corner. But the blacks, the little old black ladies, they don’t care. They’ll just go over and sit right in the middle of the white folks’ conversations. Just sit down and say, ‘How you doin’?’ And then they’ll all talk together.”
But if the Thensted community center is a sign of progress, it’s also the place where the problems of an integrated church community cannot be swept under the rug. On the day I visited, a phone call came in from a white female parishioner: family counseling. The woman’s daughter was dating a black man. The family didn’t approve and was worried they’d get married. She was calling the nuns to ask what she should do. When the call came in, I turned to Julia and said, “So I guess integrating the churches hasn’t fixed everything.”
She shook her head. “Not by a long shot.”
If you ever get a chance to stop by the Holy Land of South Louisiana, you won’t find a land of milk and honey. What you’ll find is that there are still black people here who insist things were better in “their” church. There are still white people here who’ll be friendly enough to you on Sunday but pay you no mind when they see you at the Wal-Mart on Tuesday. There are still black people here who complain that whites won’t let them do this or that. There are still white people here who gripe that the blacks “don’t put nothin’” in the collection plate—even though the blacks always put in more than the whites. There are still a lot of people here who do a whole lot of things. But that’s the point: they’re all still here. Because the Promised Land isn’t the place where our problems are solved. It’s the place where we find the courage to solve them. And that’s all it ever has been.
As I traveled around the country researching the stories in this book, wherever I was on Sunday I’d pull a church out of the phone book and check in to see what I’d find. In all of those Sundays, for the most part what I found was that 93 percent: people keeping with their own. It wasn’t racially homogenous down the line. I saw black people at white churches, and I saw white people at black churches, but what I never saw, anywhere but here, was a black and white church. St. Charles Borromeo is a true hybrid, a staid and reserved Roman Catholic liturgy with an earthy, gospel feel woven in—subdued but soulful. Each side has given something up and each side has taken something of the other, and together they have built something new. Not surprisingly, Grand Coteau’s seven-thirty gospel mass is the best-attended mass of the week, by blacks and whites alike, same as the Global Village Mass was in 1971.
“There is no other church in the Diocese of Lafayette,” Charles James says, “and I dare say in the state of Louisiana or maybe even in the South, like this one. And I’m 100 percent confident in saying we were right in the way we’ve gotten to where we are. It came at a cost. Some people left. But those that wanted to stay, stayed. And it’s gelled, I think, into a fine community. If you look around at other places, it’s not happening. And they don’t even try. The blacks prefer to be off to themselves and the whites prefer to be off to themselves—but that’s not church.”
James isn’t alone in his feelings of pride about the parish. David Knight has no regrets. The anger and protest that boiled over in the 1990s opened a lot of wounds, but Warren Broussard and David Andrus both say it was what had to be done to come through stronger on the other side. And Tom Madden, retired from the politics of the church, has the luxury of being perfectly blunt: “We’ve done something here that the rest of the diocese should have done a long time ago, but they were too afraid.”
But the person who looks upon Grand Coteau with the greatest joy would have to be Charlie Thibodeaux. The country boy from Carencro still treks home once or twice a year from his mission in Paraguay and sees, fully realized, the work that began so long ago. “It was agonizing,” he says, “but to see it now, the tension gone, the people more at ease, I thank God they’re finally united as brothers and sisters. Humanly speaking, it seemed like it was impossible. But with God there is always hope. It just takes time.”
From the Sunday morning when Charlie Thibodeaux first denounced segregation from the pulpit in 1964 to the day when Tom Madden’s bulletin announcement finally repealed it in 2004, the people of Grand Coteau wandered in the wilderness for a very long time indeed. Forty years, to be exact. For one parishioner at least, it was a longer, more painful journey than for most. He had a higher mountain to climb, but he made it to the mountaintop nonetheless. Now, every Sunday morning, the head of Grand Coteau’s volunteer fire department wakes up, puts on his finest suit, leaves his house, and makes that same forty-year journey in just a few short minutes. Following in his father’s footsteps, he heads down a long gravel drive to the end of a beautiful alley of live oaks and there, his head unbowed, Wallace Belson opens the door and walks into his church.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Above my computer, I have posted a report card of mine from Lafayette’s Episcopal School of Acadiana, dated 10/25/86. In the comment section my sixth-grade English teacher, Mark Crotty, has written, “Whenever Tanner turns in something, he says something like, ‘This is great’ or ‘This is an A.’ Well, he needs to do more than say it; he needs to do it. Tanner certainly has the ability and the desire. Now he needs the drive.”
Grade for first quarter: C+.
I would first like to thank Mr. Crotty for my C+. Without him and a handful of other great teachers, I might still be an idiot. I might not have learned anything about race at Vestavia Hills High School, but thanks to Sue Lovoy, Marilee Dukes, and Beverly Brasell, I did learn how to think, a facility that came in handy once I started thinking about race. While I retain nothing from Cas McWaters’s chemistry class, I learned a great deal from him during my trip to the principal’s office, and owe many thanks to him and the entire VHHS administration and faculty: Charles Bruce, Daniel Steele, Pauline Parker, George Hatchett, Steve Williams, Lauren Dressback, Ben Osborne, and many others who opened their offices and classrooms to me.
Mostly, thanks are due to the many families and individuals who gave me, gratis, the personal stories and memories that make up the core of this book, as well as the authors of numerous other works of far more serious and rigorous scholarship whose research and information was of great help. In the past three years I’ve also read, consumed, highlighted, and dog-eared several hundred books, essays, and contemporary primary-source documents on the subject of racial integration—and I’d be lying if I said I’d never checked Wikipedia—but major and specific works cited are acknowledged below.
In Vestavia, I owe thanks to the Williamses, Jerona, Tyrone, Tyrenda, Tyra, Tyrone, Jr., and my newly rediscovered and great friend Tycely, all of whom have adopted me as family. Alicia Thomas, who took me on the most interesting fifteen-minute bus trip of my life. U. W. Clemon, without whom my life would certainly be on a very different path. James Robinson and his sons, whom I’m told are now doing very well in their college years, Myles studying business and economics at UNC Chapel Hill and Malcolm majoring in psychology at Emory University in Atlanta. Also, Chad Jones, Janetta Howard, Sarah Wuska, William Clark, and Steve and Linda Erickson, who shared stories, a
guest bedroom, and a mission-critical basement freezer. And last, thanks to all of my fellow Vestavians, too many to name here, who all joined me in person and on Facebook to share their thoughts and memories of that very strange time known as high school.
Any book on the strange story of integration has to start by consulting The Strange Career of Jim Crow, by C. Vann Woodward, which I did. The history of Birmingham and Vestavia Hills was drawn largely from Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, by Diane McWhorter; “Demagoguery in Birmingham and the Building of Vestavia,” by Glenn T. Eskew; and Vestavia Hills: A Place Apart, by Marvin Yeomans Whiting. Major source reference for the history of school desegregation include Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality, by Richard Kluger; Bring Us Together: The Nixon Team and the Civil Rights Retreat, by Leon E. Panetta and Peter Gall; Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation, by Stuart Buck; and “Brown v. Board of Education, Fifty Years Later,” a collection of essays edited by Kevin Gaines and published in the Journal of American History, June 2004. Statistics on racial makeup of schools were taken from reports compiled by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, the National Center for Education Statistics: Common Core of Data, and the Alabama State Department of Education.
I would not have found my way to Kansas City, Missouri, without the recommendation of Johnson County native Chris Suellentrop, who introduced me to an author named Whitney Terrell—nephew by marriage to one Miller Nichols, son of J. C. Nichols. Like me, Whitney woke up one day and went digging into his own family history with race and real estate, and his novel, The King of Kings County, tells the story of Kansas City’s blockbusting and suburbanization in the way that only a novel can: fictionalized, but brutally truthful. A generous KC tour guide, Whitney pointed me in the direction of 49/63 and all the thoughtful, helpful people I met there: Ed and Mary Hood, Pat Jesaitis, Gene and Maureen Hardy, Dave Bergman, Joe Beckerman, Father Jim Bluemeyer, Father Luke Byrne, Father Norman Roetert, Albert Brooks, Helen Palmer, Jason Peters, Josh Hamm and Dave Meingold, Calvin Williford, Ruth Austin, Beth Brubaker, Renee Neades, Father Paisus Altschul. Special thanks are also due to the Johnson County NAACP, Ruth Schecter, and the helpful and patient staff of the Western Archives at UMKC. And, of course, Krista and Brian Massilonis, for throwing a great Super Bowl party where I got to meet lots of white people.
