Junior Eric Purisic examined the U.N.’s role in the Feb. 10 class virtual presentation, while Senior Jade Crichlow presented on the actions of artists. Both were identified by Associate Professor Bentley Anderson, S.J., for research they conducted in his South African history course.

“Jade and Eric both demonstrated the breadth and the depth of the international community’s stand against racial segregation and human degradation,” said Father Anderson. “It was satisfying for me, as the instructor, to see the quality of their research and analysis as they engaged a morally and ethically challenging topic.”

Purisic laid out the historic foundations of apartheid’s history. He noted that beginning in 1948, the South African government had set up a racial separation system that divided the society by white, Black, colored, and Asian. The system determined who one could marry, employment, and educational opportunities. Challenging the system could result in “repression, violence, and death,” he said.

“The first calls to address the apartheid at the U.N. were specifically headed by India,” he said, noting that India was concerned solely with how apartheid was oppressing their own minority population in the country, not the 80% Black majority.

As South Africa was a founding member of the U.N., few of the permanent members of the security council were willing to sanction the nation. Strategic Cold War alliances also played a role, he said. For example, NASA maintained land-based arrays to monitor space flight but were also used to surveil adversaries. Though Purisic uncovered plenty of speeches that denounced apartheid, he found little that fully addressed the specific methods.

That changed after the Sharpeville massacre on March 21, 1960, which began as a protest against the police use of passes to control the movement of Black workers.“Sixty-nine protesters were killed, many were shot in the back while running away, scores were wounded, and more than 18,000 people were arrested,” he said. “This was so gruesome that the U.N. finally decided to start to change its tactics and policy.”

On April 1, 1960, the U.N. released Resolution 134, which called on the South African government to abandon apartheid. Over the years, the UN passed voluntary resolutions to economically sanction, embargo, and cut off diplomatic ties with South Africa,  but that due to lack of compliance and enforcement the measures failed, he said. But it took 29 years for the U.N. to publish a “playbook” for reimagining a nation without apartheid; five years later, in 1994, it was finally abolished.

“I think it brings up some issues in general of the U.N. policies and their ability to deal with systems of oppression and racism,” he said.

Crichlow showed how outside pressure from artists helped shape the narrative of South African repression.  She focused on the Artists Against Apartheid movement that began in 1954, when Anglican Archbishop Trevor Huddleston called for a cultural boycott of the nation. The movement didn’t gain steam until the late 1960s, she said. For its part, the South African government responded with propaganda that falsely proclaimed Sun City, a well-known gambling resort controlled at the time by South Africa, allowed for mixed-race performances.

The catch was all interracial performances needed a permit first. Artists such as Frank Sinatra took advantage of this opportunity and in 1981, he reaped $1.79 million for a series of performances there, she said. The U.N. responded by creating a register of entertainers who performed in the country.

“The U.N. said that this was not supposed to be a blacklist, but it did act that way … eventually Great Britain and Northern Ireland also banned artists who appeared on the list from performing in their countries,” said Crichlow.

Not wanting to be associated with the repressive regime, 100 artists announced they would not perform there, she said.

From a 1990 African National Congress fundraiser in New York City sponsored by Eddie Murphy and Spike Lee to the chanting the name of slain activist Steve Biko at concerts to The Specials 1984 hit “Free Nelson Mandela,” artists helped foster boycotts of the nation.

“This made me hopeful of future movements that morals can weigh more heavily than money,” she said.

Crichlow said she was intrigued by how artists bypassed traditional media streams to get the truth about apartheid to their audiences through art and music, without the benefit of social media available today.

She drew a clear distinction between boycotting and cancel culture, the latter of which she said it is a trend that forces an offender to apologize, after which “we forgot exactly what happened before.”

“I think that boycotting can still work,” she said. “I think of a lot of the artists that stood up for Black Lives Matter, and how people took it to the streets, made sure they weren’t just saying ‘Black Lives Matter.’ They showed it through their actions.”

Next in the Series:

Associate Professor Laurie Lambert, Ph.D. said two students from her class will give presentations on Friday, March 26, at 5 p.m.  Jemina Molines will hold forth on Haiti and Alyssa Cantrel will discuss Jamaica. 

Father Anderson believes himself to be a member of the last category.

“Within my family, I’m convinced that my maternal great-grandfather was a person of color,” he said, adding that two years ago he found out that his descendants owned slaves.

“That’s the story of the South. Black families know it and can see it, but white families pretend it never touched them.”

A Revelation Back Home

Father Anderson’s revelation occurred during a trip to his native New Orleans in 2015, when he took his parents to visit the nearby Whitney Plantation Museum. Unlike many plantation museums, the Whitney doesn’t celebrate the “genteel South,” but focuses on the history and experience of slavery, he said. While reading about the plantation’s founding family, he came across a familiar name: Haydel. It is the same name as his mother’s descendants. And the family members, it turned out, are his direct ancestors.

John Cummings, the museum’s owner, took Father Anderson and his family on a tour of the grounds, where the two began a discussion about the Catholic Church’s social justice values and its history with slavery. The discussion eventually evolved into a challenge via a question from Cummings to Anderson: What are the Jesuits and the Catholic Church doing to help right the past wrongs of slavery?

“Because I was the descendent of a slave-owning family, and because John Cummings challenged me and asked ‘What are you doing?’ I wanted to do an academic project that raised the questions he asked. I can’t change the world, but I can, in my own small way, raise the consciousness of Catholics regarding race relations.”

Father Anderson organized a symposium, Slavery on the Cross, held this past April at Fordham. He said that the speakers at the conference addressed the questions directly, but also took the issues of slavery, segregation, and bigotry beyond the local level and examined them as a national and international issue as well.

With the conference fresh in his mind, this past June Father Anderson went to South Africa to continue his research on the Catholic Church’s response to the nation’s apartheid in the post-World-War-II years. (He’s been doing research in South Africa every year since 2004.) There, Catholicism is a minority religion in what is primarily a Protestant country, a dynamic that Father Anderson could relate to, having grown up as a Catholic in the mostly Protestant city of Atlanta, Georgia.

South African Parallels 

He examined how South Africa’s governing National Party attempted to control the education of the black population through the Bantu Education Act of 1953. After the act was passed, black South Africans’ educational opportunities were restricted, he said. The government, in effect, only allowed blacks to receive an education that was comparable to, say, what would be the 4th or 5th-grade level in the United States. Very few black South Africans continued on to secondary or tertiary levels.

“The government did not want the Native peoples to get the idea that they would follow the same educational track as the Europeans, a track that prepared them for college,” he said. “There was no way they were going to be allowed to be equals.”

The ban was a seminal event for the Catholic Church because its mission in South Africa was anchored in “evangelization through education,” he said. The government forced missionaries operating schools (both Protestants and Catholics) to take a stand: Either give up control of their educational institutions or assume full financial responsibility for them. Up to this point in time, the faith-based schools had received government subsidies.

The Catholic Church would not relinquish control of its mission-based schools, said Father Anderson. It continued to support educating the black population until it became financially unsustainable in the mid-1960s.

The result of those educational restrictions, said Father Anderson, was the creation of a “permanent underclass” that will take several generations to undo.

Navigating Faith as a Minority

“What drew me to South Africa is that Catholics were a minority in a Protestant world. I’m interested in questions of how believers navigate in that world. What do you do when you know you’re not really welcome?” Furthermore, “how does a religious body practice what it preaches in an inhospitable environment? Does it follow its precepts and teachings, or does it compromise? And if it compromises, how does it justify doing so?”

He said his love of the Catholic Church, his Jesuit foundation, his experience living as a Catholic among Protestants in Atlanta,, and his recent discoveries about his own ancestry have allowed him to look more deeply at the race question and what it means to be an outsider. He continues to probe difficult questions as they relate to places and institutions he cares most about, particularly the Church and its role in matters of slavery, segregation, and apartheid.

“Racial identity is a construct, so regardless of one’s racial background, the one unifying factor is Catholicism,” he said. “One of the precepts of the Church is the unity of the human race, because we’re all children of God. If you accept that, then there’s no room for separation or segregation. That is the antithesis of Catholic thought.”

“Why? Because we kicked them under the bus in 1863,” Cummings said, noting the year slavery ended. “Do we have a moral responsibility? Jesus Christ says so. Don’t you think so?”

Moreover, Cummings wants to know “What are [we]going to do about it?”

Cummings will be the keynote speaker at an April 1 symposium to be held at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus titled, “Slavery on the Cross: Catholics and the ‘Peculiar Institution,’ Praxis and Practice.” He said he will discuss the same question with academics and activists sitting on three separate panels.

Bentley Anderson, S.J., associate professor of history and associate chair of the Department of African and African American Studies, which is co-hosting the event, said that the keynote talk will be preceded by two morning panels that will contextualize the topic, and followed by an afternoon panel that will address its legacy.

“We’ve invited scholars who deal with questions of race and religion from the past and into the present,” he said. “And we’ll have folks from the New York region who are actually putting their faith into practice by addressing issues of systemic racism.”

For Cummings, addressing the legacy of racism has become the culmination of a life’s work. After earning a law degree from Loyola University New Orleans and practicing for several years, he purchased a sugar cane plantation near New Orleans as an investment. But as he began to delve into the plantation’s history, he said he was shocked by his own ignorance of the institution of slavery.

Today, the Whitney Plantation is the nation’s first museum fully dedicated to the history of slavery, said Cummings. The plantation now celebrates the strength of the men and women who toiled in its fields, and it displays a wide variety historic items relating to slavery.

An Irish Catholic who had a modest upbringing in New Orleans, Cummings said his own working class family has no direct lineage to slave owners. But he believes all Americans must contend with the legacy.

“We’re all recovering racists because we were raised in this place,” he said.

Father Anderson, who also grew up in New Orleans, said he met Cummings when he toured the plantation with his parents. The two began a discussion about the church’s history with slavery, in which Father Anderson said Cummings did indeed ask him “What are you going to do about it?”

The April 1 symposium evolved from that conversation, said Father Anderson.

“He challenged me on a faith level and academic level, and what I can do is bring people together to discuss, reflect, and act,” said Father Anderson.

Cummings said he struggles on a personal level with the moral conundrum of the church’s role in slavery. He hopes the symposium will raise consciousness among contemporary Americans that, although they may not bear the responsibility for slavery, they must take responsibility for its legacy.

“We have put slavery in the rearview mirror,” he said. “It was done on someone else’s watch—not so far back we can’t see it—but we have to look forward and find out what our obligation is to its descendants.”

The event will be held from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Corrigan Conference Center.

Participants:
Thomas Murphy, S.J., Seattle University
M. Shawn Copeland, Ph.D., Boston College
Bryan Massingale, S.T.D., Fordham University
James O’Toole, Ph.D., Boston College
John Cummings, Whitney Plantation Museum
Albert Holtz, O.S.B., Newark Abbey – Newak, NJ
Gregory Chisholm, S.J., St. Charles Borromeo – Harlem, NY
Maurice Nutt, C.Ss.R., Xavier University of Louisiana Institute
Jeannine Hill Fletcher, Ph.D., Fordham University

Co-sponsored by: Theology Dept., Political Science Dept., Philosophy Dept., Communication and Media Studies, Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, The Jesuits of Fordham University.