Word: rummel
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...garden of the archbishop's residence in New Orleans, a group of Roman Catholic women chatted and fingered their rosaries, waiting for the Most Reverend Joseph Francis Rummel, 85, to lead them on a Holy Week pilgrimage of prayer to the city's shrines. They studiously tried to ignore women pickets protesting the archbishop's excommunication the day before of three Roman Catholics who had opposed his decision to desegregate the city's Catholic schools...
Suddenly, as Rummel appeared, a distraught, dark-haired woman flung herself through the gathering and fell on her knees before him. "I ask your blessing," cried Mrs. Bernard J. Gaillot, 41, one of the three who had been named in the excommunication order. "But I am not apologizing. Look up to heaven and admit that you know it's God's law to segregate. Don't listen to Satan, listen to God." Startled, Rummel said nothing, and Mrs. Gaillot was led away by some of the women pilgrims. "May God have mercy on you!" she said...
...fallen to Rummel, in his old age, to make the key decision. Born in Baden, Germany, Rummel grew up in the Gemiitlichkeit atmosphere of Manhattan's Yorkville district, and served in a number of New York City parishes, including one in Harlem, after his ordination in 1902. Named Bishop of Omaha in 1928, Rummel seven years later was appointed Archbishop of New Orleans, which boasts the largest Roman Catholic population (654,000) of any city in the Deep South...
...Rummel applauded the 1954 Supreme Court decision that outlawed segregation in public schools, and began to nudge his reluctant flock toward accepting segregation as "morally wrong and sinful." He eliminated "whites only" pews in New Orleans' churches in 1953, and two years later shut down a church whose white parishioners objected to the assignment of a Negro priest. Yet, despite the example of Joseph Cardinal Ritter, who began to integrate Catholic education in St. Louis in 1947, Rummel made no real effort to bring his own parochial schools into compliance...
Parochial schools enroll half the white pupils in New Orleans. After Rummel's order, segregationist Catholics considered transferring their children to public schools. But in a landmark decision last week, New Orleans' Federal District Judge J. Skelly Wright took a severe look at New Orleans' public schools, which still have admitted only twelve Negroes to six previously all-white schools. Judge Wright agreed with 102 Negro petitioners that the city school board is hardly desegregating "with all deliberate speed." Wright forbade the board from further use of the Louisiana pupil-placement law, and ordered desegregation...