The desegregation of Saint Louis University and its mysteries

Faculty at Saint Louis University in 1945
From 1945 Saint Louis University Yearbook

This post continues the discussing from the blogpost "Arnold Ross and the desegregation of Saint Louis University."

A companion post on Ross is the blogpost "Arnold Ross and the Afro-Am Student Protests" which discusses Arnold Ross's involvement with African American student protests at The Ohio State University.

In this post, I will continue talking about Arnold Ross and the desegregation of Saint Louis University.  In examining what happened, one thing that stands out is how different Ross's account is from the published accounts.

Recall here is what Arnold said:

One of my students at St. Louis University was the first black woman to receive an M.S. in mathematics in the South. She was handicapped because she had had polio when she was young, and she was paralyzed in the left leg. The students and the young priests were with me in saying she should be accepted to the university, and that’s actually what made it possible for the university to make an exception and to start accepting black students when it was a very unpopular thing to do.

This sounds straightforward, and I might expand on it as follows.  After finishing college, Margaret Taylor started working as a public school teacher in St Louis but after a few years decided she wanted to continue her education by getting a master's degree in math.  If it wasn't for segregation, this would have been easy as she could have started to attend Saint Louis University, but at the time, SLU and every other university in the state which offered a master's degree in math refused to admit Taylor because of her race.

Arnold Ross along with some students and young priests somehow became aware of her situation and began advocating on her behalf to the administration.  Taylor was a very sympathetic figure: she was a well-educated math teacher and a practicing Catholic who had a physical disability.  The administration decided to make an exception.  Once Taylor was admitted under an exception and attended without incident, university administrator realized that they should just end the practice of segregation.

Surprisingly this straightforward account is totally at odds with most published accounts.  There Margaret Taylor, Arnold Ross, the SLU students, and the young priests do not appear at all. Rather many published accounts attribute desegregation almost entirely to the actions of one faculty member: Father Claude H. Heithaus.

Father Claude H. Heithaus
From findagrave.com

Heithaus was a professor of classical archeology who had grown up in St Louis and worked at St Louis University since 1940.   A representative account of his role in desegregation is given in the article "Catholic integration in St. Louis, 1935-1947" by Donald J. Kemper, which was published in the Missouri Historical Review.  Kemper traces the origins of desegregation to activities of the local chapter of the Midwest Clergy Conference on Negro Welfare.  The MCCNW was an organization of clergy working to convert the large population of African Americans who had immigrated from the rural South to cities in the Midwest and North.  Local conference members had decided that it was essential to desegregate Catholic colleges, and in 1943, they helped an African American woman, Eloyse Foster, apply to Webster College (a Catholic woman's college).  Foster's admission was blocked by the Archbishop of St Louis, but the whole episode received considerable attention in the press.

Father Heithaus says that he learned about the Archbishop's defense of segregation and decided to take action.  In Kemper's words:

Noting his schedule to preach at the student Mass in the College Church on February 11, he decided to face the issue of the university's refusing entrance to blacks. In a carefully prepared sermon, which he distributed to the local dailies and reprinted in the student newspaper, Heithaus accused the university of being immoral, un-Christian and un-Catholic for discriminating against blacks. At the close of the sermon, he asked the mass of students to stand up and pledge never to have anything to do with discrimination against blacks. Nearly thousand students took the pledge, with no dissenters. The next summer, Saint Louis University began accepting black students.

Father Heithaus's speech was published on the front page of the student newspaper
The University News, February 11, 1944

What is going on here?  This is totally different from Ross's account.  Here desegregation is described as a fait accompli pulled off by Father Heithaus.  Arnold Ross, the students, and the young priests (which probably didn't include Heithaus; he was 46 years old, 8 years older than Ross) are nowhere to be seen.

The book Better the Dream on SLU goes a little deeper into desegregation.  The book presents Heithaus's speech as an important event, but one that was the culmination of agitation by a number of priests and university administrators.

Partial steps toward desegregation had been made a year before Heithaus's speech.  That year Interim University President Kelly created a committee charged with making a recommendation on desegregation.  The committee recommended against full desegregation and instead recommended desegregating the School of Medicine as an experimental first step. However, the recommendation was not implemented as a vote of the administrative board failed to produce a clear mandate.

The next academic year, President Kelly was replaced by Patrick J. Holloran.  Under pressure from priests to consider desegregation, President Holloran sent out letters to alumni and other friends of the university asking their opinion about admitting African American students.  The letter began circulating shortly before Heithaus's speech.  In fact, a copy of the letter, which had been intended as a discreet private inquiry, was published in newspapers the day of Heithaus's speech.

In the account in Better the Dream, it is unclear what impact Heithaus's speech had.  Heithaus received a great deal of public support, and President Holloran called a meeting of university administrators three days after the speech to discuss desegregation.  However, that meeting was inconclusive, and the President only publicly announced the decision to admit African American students in April, three months later.  Moreover, his announcement makes no reference to the speech, and it was made a few weeks after a qualified African American, Norman Cothran, had applied for admission.  Cothran's application might very well have been the primary catalyst.

A close study of the timeline in Better the Dream also calls into question part of the account in the Missouri Historical Review.  In the latter account, Heithaus unilaterally decides to take a stand against segregation, but the fact that the President's letter was leaked to the press on the same day as his speech suggests that it was part of a coordinated effort in favor of rapid desegregation.

University President Holloran
From findagrave.com

Finally, there is a third account of desegregation that seems to runs counter to both Ross's recollections and the accounts in sources like Better the Dream and the Missouri Historical Review article.  In 1951, John J. McCarthy, the Director of Public Information at SLU, published his article "Facing the Race Problem at St. Louis University" in the Jesuit Educational Quarterly.  Here's how he describes how segregation ended:

Response to the letters [from Holloran about desegregation] were quite strongly in favor of the step being taken.  A report of the results was given to a second joint meeting of the Board of Trustees and the Council of Regents and Deans, and the information was also passed on to Father Zuercher and to Father Maher.  The opinion was unanimous that the step should be taken.  Five Negro students were therefore admitted to the 1944 summer sessions.

In this account, not only do Arnold Ross, the students, and the young priests not appear, but Heithaus is absent as well.  This may reflect university politics.  Not long after the speech, President Holloran exiled Heithaus from SLU for agitating for further integration of the university.  (Accounts have Heithaus either leaving for Kansas City to work as an army chaplin or being sent to Marquette University in Wisconsin.)  As a university employee, McCarthy may have felt it best to avoid mentioning the matter.

A study of the historical sources being used sheds a light on the accounts.  The sources seem to primarily be interviews with Heithaus and SLU archival holdings (like minutes of meetings of the Board of Trustees).  Additional sources are going to be needed to create a full picture of desegregation that integrates Ross's recollections with the current published accounts.  I am not going to be doing this here, but in a later blogpost, I will put the African American students who desegregated SLU into the record.

This blogpost about Saint Louis University continues with  "The Saint Louis University students."