Whenever I get into this subject, it always sounds self-serving on my part — the importance of local journalism and the American public's support of it. But let's give credit where it's due.
As I worked on my Friday Sun column, I had a question: How did majestic old St. Paul's Roman Catholic Church in East Baltimore become, in 1968, St. Francis Xavier Roman Catholic Church, home to the nation's first parish of Black Catholics?
The published accounts that I found, including a solid story by John Rivera in The Sun in the 1990s, offered no explanation about that transition. But, in an earlier story, published in 1970 in the bygone Baltimore Evening Sun, an outspoken Josephite priest assigned to the parish stated his view of it: The whites "ran out" of the solidly Irish-Catholic neighborhood. It appears that a merger of the historic parishes never happened, and that fits with the grand sweep of Baltimore history as courts broke the locks of state-sanctioned segregation and white families moved from their old neighborhoods.
St. Francis Xavier still stands today as a Black parish that traces its history back to Baltimore in the late 18th Century.
It's interesting that the change occurred in one of the most tumultuous years in American history: 1968. The war in Vietnam was at its height and, largely because of it, President Lyndon Johnson announced he would not seek a second term. Bobby Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated. Cities, including Baltimore, were hit with race riots, fires and murders. White flight had already been underway, but it accelerated in the 1960s and 1970s.
When you look back on various records, that fact is seldom stated. Until recently, institutional histories rarely acknowledged the role of race in social change. It's not surprising that newspapers, with their largely white staffs of reporters and editors in those days, worked around the uncomfortable fact of white flight. So even the brief reference to it, in Sharon Dickman's 1970 story about the Rev. Phillip Linden, deserved to be recognized. It was local journalism. It filled out the record. If we lose that, we lose the full picture of our history.
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