"Standing up to the racists"

When Uptown New Orleans shunned anti-segregation Judge J. Skelly Wright, Father Twomey stood by him

J. Skelly Wright speaks about his life and work on Louisiana Public Broadcasting’s “Louisiana Legends.” Click here to watch the interview.

In December 1945, J. Skelly Wright, then an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana, looked out the window of his office, where a Christmas party was in full swing. His gaze fell upon the Lighthouse for the Blind across the street. What he saw so deeply unsettled him that, decades later, it remained seared in his memory.

The Lighthouse for the Blind was having a Christmas party as well—or, rather, two Christmas parties. When guests arrived who were white, they were led straight into the building’s main entrance. But when Black guests approached, they were guided into a separate room at the building’s rear.

As Wright recalled the incident in 1979, he remained incredulous. “The blind couldn’t segregate themselves. They couldn’t see. There was somebody else doing it for them.”

“It had an effect on me,” Wright added. “It affects me even now. It didn’t shock me. I looked at it twice, believe me, but it didn’t shock me. It just began to eat at me. And it eats at me now. It began to make me think more of the injustice of it, of the whole system that I had taken for granted. I was getting mature, too, thirty-five or thirty-six, and you began to think of things. When you go to bed at night, you think of it. That was the beginning, really.”¹

It was the beginning of Wright’s awareness that the system of segregation in which he had been raised was profoundly evil, contradicting the laws of the United States and divine law. That incident, and others like it, were in his mind in February 1956 when, as a U.S. District Court Judge, he wrote in his historic opinion Bush v. Orleans Parish School Board, the first desegregation order ever issued in the Deep South,

The problem of changing a people’s mores, particularly those with an emotional overlay, is not to be taken lightly. It is a problem which will require the utmost patience, understanding, generosity and forbearance from all of us, of whatever race. But the magnitude of the problem may not nullify the principle. And that principle is that we are, all of us, freeborn Americans, with a right to make our way, unfettered by sanctions imposed by man because of the work of God.

It took nearly five years, and many more courtroom battles, before Wright succeeded in having his decision implemented. But once it happened, on November 14, 1960, with four first-grade girls making history as the first Black children to attend New Orleans schools that were formerly restricted to white students, Wright’s life was turned upside down.

Segregationists, who included nearly all of Uptown New Orleans society—the “respectable” citizens—unleashed a torrent of hatred against the Black first-graders and everyone who enabled racial integration of schools. Their targets included the teachers who continued to teach at the schools that the Black students attended; the few white students whose parents continued to send them to those schools, and, not least, Judge Wright, his wife, and his thirteen-year-old son.

Norman Rockwell, “The Problem We All Live With,” 1964

On November 23, 1960, two days after four Black first-grade girls entered first grade in New Orleans public schools, a mob of segregationists were warmly welcome onto the floor of the New Orleans legislature. The top of the sign held by the woman at center reads,”Scalawag Wright Is Wrong” (St. Mary and Franklin Banner-Tribune (Franklin, LA), November 19, 1960, page 7).

For weeks on end, the Wrights received a constant stream of telephone threats, both at home and at Judge Wright’s office. A cross was burned on their lawn, and a cadre of New Orleans policemen showed up reluctantly on assignment to guard their house. A mob of segregationists descended upon the state capitol to lead a mock funeral of Wright and were welcomed by legislators, as the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported:

Parents and children from integrated New Orleans schools bore a miniature black coffin, containing a blackened effigy of U.S. Judge J. Skelly Wright, into the Louisiana Capitol. . . . The House stood up and, with a long roll of applause, saluted the parents. . . . As the demonstrators moved into the legislative chambers, one woman in the group shouted, “The judge is dead, we have slaughtered him.” Some of the group feigned weeping and mourning, others laughed. The blackened doll inside the yard-long coffin wore a black suit. In its pocket was a small gavel.²

The venomous attacks also reached Judge Wright’s mailbox. Segregationists typically attacked him as a communist, much as today’s right-wing antagonists tar promoters of racial diversity with the “wokeist” epithet. Here are two examples from the many articles of hate mail that Wright preserved:³

Wright: (Perhaps I should greet you as “Red” or “Negro-Lover”)

Now that you’ve made history, I, as a “white” father, teacher, taxpayer, and citizen advise you to go to your kind—perhaps to Castro, perhaps to the Congo, or better yet—to Moscow and Siberia. If you do so, all Louisianians will be delighted, particularly the people you so shamefully have jurisdiction over and are so repulsive to.

Don’t forget that you are a “despised” man (no doubt your “white” wife shares or feels as we do) and you are directly responsible for the stabbing, shooting, and raping now taking place in New Orleans. Why not disappear?

A white man
Albert DuPre
Eunice, LA
November 17, 1960

Your honor;

I am wondering if you are part of a plan to turn our Republic into a dictatorship? Are you planning to take over the reins in Louisiana? Who, then, will rule Mississippi? Is Adam Clayton Powell to be the ruler of New York? Unthinkable? Well I tell you it seems to be shaping up. Your dictatorial decisions of recent weeks are appalling. I don’t know why our officials haven’t arrested you and committed you to an insane asylum. Why don’t you resign your position? Or better still, Drop dead!

Ralph L. Pippins
Jones, LA
November 21, 1960

Although there were some from New Orleans and beyond who wrote to express support, “most of the letters were extremely negative,” according to Davison M. Douglas, who researched them among Wright’s papers at the Library of Congress.⁴

It will come as no surprise to readers of Matters Twomey that one of those who reached out to encourage Wright was Father Louis J. Twomey, SJ, the founder and director of the Institute of Industrial Relations at Loyola University New Orleans. An early advocate of civil rights, Twomey was among New Orleans’s most vocal white allies of the Black community.

Father Louis J. Twomey, SJ, as he appeared in “Autopsy on Operation Abolition,” November 1961

During the tumultuous weeks following the implementation of Wright’s order, Father Twomey was appalled by the failure of New Orleans Archbishop Joseph Rummel and other Catholics to lead on the integration issue. Discretion required that he avoid making public criticism of Rummel, with whom he had a good working relationship. Instead, he used his newsletter Christ’s Blueprint for the South, the audience of which was limited to his fellow Jesuits, to call out more generally the Church’s failure to educate students in racial justice.

In the December 1960 Blueprint, Twomey gave a blow-by-blow account of the New Orleans anti-integration protests, calling them “a descent into barbarism.” His intention in detailing the goings-on, he wrote, was “to emphasize to what devastating extremes a purely negative attitude towards Communism can go.” He explained,

All the racist leaders in the current debacle are stridently anti-communist. They appropriate to themselves the title of defenders of Democracy, of the “traditional” American way of life. Their favorite epithet for those who oppose them is “communist.” To them integration is synonymous with Communism. They charge the Federal judiciary and even Archbishop Rummel with “having entered into the communist conspiracy.” And these attitudes characterize not only those on the lower educational levels, but very many with college degrees. Such are the neuroticisms of the white supremacists. In their blind, unyielding stand for the enforced separation of the races, they are so irrational as to make impossible a rational judgment about them. But this much can be said with assurance: it is they, and not rather easily identifiable communist agents, who constitute by far the greater menace to America’s efforts to lead the world to peace with justice and charity.⁵

As always, Father Twomey closed by calling Catholics to ask why their co-religionists were visible on the front lines of those promoting evil, when they should be lighting the way to the good.

What we can do rationally is to examine critically why the leading roles in obstructing interracial justice and charity are often played by graduates of Catholic schools not only in New Orleans, but in the Ciceroes, the Trumbull Parks, the Levittowns, and in the other cities and towns around the country. Why are so many of our graduates conspicuous in this matter of violating the fundamental Christian imperative: “Little children, love one another”?

After the December Blueprint went to press, Twomey wrote a personal letter to Wright. He was long acquainted with the judge, who was a Loyola University New Orleans graduate and a faculty member of Loyola’s School of Law. Their correspondence, which survives in the Twomey Papers at Loyola University New Orleans, appears here for the first time.

On December 19, 1960, Twomey wrote:

Dear Judge Wright:

For many weeks now, I have been intending to send you these few lines. For whatever it may mean to you, I am tremendously proud of the physical and moral courage you have shown in standing up to the racists. Your continued insistence that the protection of the Constitution of the United States applies to all our citizens irrespective of race is an achievement that makes you tower among the lesser men of this community.

I realize that at times your position must seem very lonely. However, you know and I know that there are thousands in New Orleans and elsewhere throughout the United States who regard your courageous action as one of the bright spots in the tragedy of New Orleans.

God bless you and continue to inspire you to fight for what is right and just through the implementation of constitutional law.

A most happy Christmas and blessed new year to you and yours.

God bless you always.⁶

Twomey signed the letter with the valediction “Gratefully in Christ.”

Three days later, on December 22, Judge Wright wrote a reply that shows the warmth that existed between the two men:

Dear Father Twomey:

I have your letter of December 19th. I have known all along that you were in our corner, and I am grateful for your continuing support. If we can get more people of good will to speak out on this problem as you do, our job will be made easier. But whether or no, we’ll see it through.

Sincerely,

Skelly⁷

Eleven years later, following Twomey’s death, Judge Wright, who was by then a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, paid a succinct tribute to him in a letter to the Jesuit’s longtime assistant Ray Ariatti.

“In my judgment,” Wright wrote, “Father Twomey contributed more to the advancement of social justice in the New Orleans area than anyone I know.”

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And now, a life update: I am grateful to all of you who have been supporting me at this Substack since I began work on my Father Twomey biography, A Priest of Good Trouble. Recently I have been had to confront the reality that my full-time job, which I began in June, does not afford me the leisure to write that I had thought it would.

Since I was seventeen, every job that I have ever had was a means to support myself so that I could write. Some of these positions, such as those on seminary faculties, were also meaningful in themselves. In the best of them, I found joy and a certain kind of fulfillment in teaching. But I always looked forward most to writing, and I placed my identity in that.

Now, when I come home from work and attempt to resume writing my half-completed Father Twomey biography, I find myself unable to get into the mental space that is necessary to accomplish it. This causes me deep sadness.

It’s not that I have anything to complain about. I am blessed to have a full-time position doing work that the Church needs. Each day I come home knowing that I have done something to help people in difficult life situations.

The problem is that, to write a biography, I need to have room in my mind to live a parallel life. At day I can be Dawn Eden Goldstein, canon lawyer. But at night I have to be Father Twomey—or at least a preternaturally perceptive fly on the wall at every moment of his working life.

In the past, I was able to live on two planes in that manner. That is how I managed to write Father Ed: The Story of Bill W.’s Spiritual Sponsor while studying canon law full-time. So I was expecting to be able to do the same while working in my new position. It was a shock to find that the writing muscles that I had developed over forty years were unequal to the present task.

So I am feeling sad, and I am getting appropriate help for that. I ask your prayers. Hopefully the Lord will show me a way to find joy and consolation in my daily life and work, regardless of whether I am doing the type of writing project that my heart wants to do.

Last, I want to thank those of you who have continued to support me with paid subscriptions after I made Matters Twomey free. The funds that you send help subsidize the comforting treats that I enjoy after work—cardamom tea and poke bowls. I hope I can thank you in person one day, but in the meantime, please be assured of my gratitude and prayers. I pray for all my nonpaying readers too! God bless you.

1. Jack Bass, Unlikely Heroes (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), 112–113.

2. “Parents Stage Demonstration: Carry Black Coffin, Flags into Capitol,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans), November 24, 1960, 22.

3. These and other letters received by Wright in the wake of his Bush v. Orleans Parish School Board decision are quoted in Davison M. Douglas, “Bush v. Orleans Parish School Board and the Desegregation of New Orleans Schools” (Washington, DC: Federal Judicial Center, 2005), 74ff.

4. Douglas, 74.

5. Louis J. Twomey, SJ, “Communism: Its Answer in the Social Apostolate (Part 12),” Christ’s Blueprint for the South (December 1960), 6.

6. Louis J. Twomey, SJ, letter to J. Skelly Wright, December 19, 1960. Louis J. Twomey, SJ, Papers, Monroe Library Special Collections & Archives, Loyola University New Orleans, Box 21, Folder 6.

7. J. Skelly Wright, letter to Louis J. Twomey, SJ, December 22, 1960. Louis J. Twomey, SJ, Papers, Monroe Library Special Collections & Archives, Loyola University New Orleans, Box 21, Folder 6.