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Playing to the beat of a distant violin

July 6, 2010 Leave a comment

Silent violin

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One of my favorite stories from my checkered career is this profile of Stephen Kelley, a fine symphony violinist who at the time I interviewed him lived in a trailer park and worked a warehouse job — not exactly what you would expect from a classical player. Various traumas sent him on a path of meditation, yoga, philosophy, and enlightenment, hardly the pursuits you associate with a trailer park resident.  But then again everything about Kelley was incongruous, always in an interesting way, always overturning your stereotypes.  He’s a genuine eccentric in the best sense of the word.  I understand he’s still playing of course but that he’s left behind that warehouse job to teach school.  This story epitomizes my penchant and instinct for writing about people and their passions and their magnificent obsessions. I think I gravitate to these subjects because I identify with the subjects so much.  The piece originally appeared in the now defunct Omaha Weekly.

 

Playing to the beat of a distant violin

©by Leo Adam Biga

Originally published in the Omaha Weekly

 

The surprisingly spacious house trailer is situated on a small lot in the Park Meadows Mobile Home community in northwest Omaha. The pale blue trailer’s owner, Super Target warehouse laborer Stephen Kelley, is a balding, middle-age man dressed in the sweatshirt, jeans and sneakers he will wear on the overnight shift that evening. The decor inside is warm and cozy. Vintage photographic portraits adorn the imitation wood-paneled walls. By mid-afternoon a fine bottle of wine has been opened and, as sleet showers shimmer outside, a relaxed Kelley removes his concert violin from a case and begins playing a passage from Antonin Dvorak’s Four Romantic Pieces. The vibrato is rich and sweet. The technique, assured. The incongruity of it all — a mobile home dweller who stocks frozen foods for a living who also happens to play the violin sublimely — is a bit surreal. But, in one of those instances where appearances and labels can be deceiving, it turns out his craftsmanship is the result of years of serious classical training. He has, in fact, played in the first violin sections of several Midwest symphony orchestras, including the Omaha Symphony, which he first joined at the tender age of 18.

Once on the fast track to a promising career in the mainstream classical music world, Kelley has in recent years chosen to follow a road less traveled, especially for someone with his solid credentials. He has two degrees from Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, he trained under top violin instructors and he boasts a resume full of solid professional music performances. A self-described “misfit,” he has largely dropped-out of traditional music circles to pursue an artistic-survival course some might call eccentric. That has meant working a series of regular jobs, including a long stint as a manager and maintenance supervisor with McDonald’s, to support himself, his wife and son. Since suffering a severe head injury in an automobile crack-up in 1985, and reeling from an emotional collapse that followed, Kelley has worked no fewer than nine positions.

 

 

All the while, he has continued perfecting his violin playing. He did advance studies with, among others, the late David Majors, who was a respected violin instructor in the area, and with noted violinist Kenneth Goldsmith, a member of the world-renown Mirecourt Trio. He has performed occasional solo recitals and as part of several ensembles. He still sometimes sits-in with area orchestras.

He has also continued a lifelong search for inner peace and spiritual enlightenment. Raised a Catholic, Kelley became enchanted with the writing of Thomas Merton and at one point came close to entering the monastic life (he earned a vocation scholarship to Benedictine). Later, he fell away from Catholicism to explore Quaker teachings and Eastern philosophies. In the past six years he has immersed himself in yoga, using meditation, along with his beloved music, to help him deal with his demons. Chief among those demons is his highly emotional nature and his fanaticsim with doing things right. A serious student of past music and musicians, Kelley sets standards that are perhaps beyond his reach. An instructor of piano at Creighton University, Elaine Majors, knows Kelley well and his preoccupation with trying to achieve a purity in his playing that approaches the masters. “He is so well-versed in how a piece of music should sound that if he can’t produce it, it’s very defeating to him and absolute agony for him.” It’s why, she said, he would find teaching music too frustrating — as the search for that perfect golden tone would surely always elude him or his students.

 

 

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Thomas Merton

 

Those familiar with Kelley confirm he is an artist of rare insight who has followed a maverick path. “He has a very fine musical background. He’s very talented. He’s very perceptive. He studies other musicians carefully. He’s constantly self-analytical. He continually veers off in other directions. He’s always looking for new approaches. He’s interesting, he’s different and he’s engaged. Music is his life,” said Elaine Majors, whose late husband, David, he studied under many years.

“His talent is evident in his unflagging interest in all aspects of the violin,” said Arnold Schatz, a longtime Omaha Symphony player and retired music educator whom Kelley has studied with on several occasions. “He has not only a deep interest in the violin, but rather a passion and almost an obsession with the violin.”

Kelley acknowledges his hard-to-satisfy aesthetic nature has been a source of torture inside and outside the music scene. “I’m sensitive and I’m a perfectionist, and that’s very tough on me. I often work with people who don’t understand me at all. People harass the hell out of me. But I understand how to do my job very well. I don’t ever slack off and I don’t ever do second-rate,” he said before charting a litany of dirt he asserts has been done to him by employers and co-workers upset with his overzealousness. “I’ve had all sorts of nasty things happen to me. I’ve been walking through disasters for 20 years.”

He realizes he sometimes may have exacerbated bad situations by having “stepped on a few toes” or by “taking a stance” or by speaking out against “greedy, ruthless, dishonest” practices he feels are rampant in corporate America. “What you find out in these companies is that everybody’s in it for themselves.”

Call it naivete or idealism, but Kelley himself sometimes sounds like a dreamer who cannot quite come to terms with the human condition. He has paid a price for his rather romantic notions and high-strung nature. For example, as a young man he crumbled under the strain of losing a prized violin and breaking up with his then fiance in short order and subsequently endured the first of his nervous breakdowns. While he has avoided further emotional crises since the head trauma he suffered in the 1980s, he still occasionally battles a bad case of nerves when performing in public. His stage fright first reared its ugly head when, as a Benson High School senior, he froze on a solo of Autumn Leaves during a school concert. “I locked up and I couldn’t move the bow. The nerves just exploded on me. I never even put the bow on the violin. I had practiced the piece so intensely and with so much trepidation that when the movement came my body gave out — literally. So, I’ve had to fight nerves ever since.”

 

 

 

 

 

He said he has come to largely control his butterflies through a combination of intense preparation and pharmaceutical aids. “Part of dealing with nerves is being prepared 200 percent and understanding your craft like a rocket scientist. I’ve been working on my craft for over 30 years, and I still fear the nerves. I tend to take a beta blocker to keep from flying off the handle. The pill doesn’t stop the adrenalin at all, but at least I can function” with it.

Far from being crippled by his intuitiveness, Kelley makes great thrift of it when performing, which for him is an intense experience but one made even more so when playing passages of heightened emotion. “When I play a piece of music I look for the emotional high points. The passages where goose bumps come. They’re there. If you don’t find them, you don’t know the music.” Those moments become what he calls “ecstatic” moments for him and, hopefully, audience members as well. “The emotions are overpowering and I let them flow into the music. The emotion is carried. You want to connect emotionally with the audience — from your very heart, right to the person in front of you, so that they can feel you right through the violin.”

Not unlike meditation, he said playing can transport him to another place. “There are spots in the music where I feel the breath coming and releasing with a sense of peace. They’re like lifting spots. It’s rather magical.”

Giving into one’s emotions during a performance can detract from technical perfection, which is why he said most classical violinists prefer to play it safe rather than expose their depth of feeling and risk tonal variations on stage. “Part of that reluctance,” he said, “is because everything is so professional and competitive and it’s the whole thing about — you’ve got to get every note perfect and the critics have to like what you do.” It’s not that Kelley doesn’t believe in rigorous technique. He does. In fact, he finds far too many of today’s players technically sloppy, with excessive movement in their bowing elbow and wrist producing a wavering and somewhat flattened vibrato. The player is working against his instrument rather than being one with it. The technique he prefers employs minimal arm movement, which he said produces a richer, more seamless tone. “I have a very advanced, efficient violin technique that is focused, tight, fast, and that produces the incomparable…the essence — beauty. There’s no other word for it. There’s a little roundness to it. Not so much that it overpowers what you’re trying to play. But it just takes it further. Then you’re bringing out the potential of the violin. And then if you think beauty, it seems like the violin itself responds.”

Kelley’s affinity for the mystical and ethereal has driven his quest to try and master yoga. Since attending a public meditation given by her in Boulder, Co., Kelley has become a devotee of Shri Anandi Ma, a world-renowned instructor in Kundalini Maha Yoga, which is based on the premise that there is a divine healing energy in each of us waiting to be tapped. Kelley, who describes her as “a saint,” feels yoga has changed his life. “It has been very effective for me with stress reduction and with moving me into other levels of consciousness. Breath regulation is the be all and end all of it. My most intense experiences — what I call ecstatic experiences — have meant that my breathing went from self-control to almost divine control. The sensations in the body are subtle and intense. The feeling within you is a physical sensation of great cellular togetherness and peace. Breathing becomes almost like a joy. I wish my violin playing went that far.”

 

 

 

Beyond these ancient mind-body-spirit traditions, Kelley derives what might be called spiritual sustenance from his favorite authors, including Loren Eiseley and Sherwood Anderson, and from his favorite composers, including Johann Brahms and Franz Schubert. From early childhood on Kelley has indulged his two primary passions — reading and music — with the kind of enthusiasm found only in the most ardent followers. He once owned an extensive collection of books and records, but has sold or given most of it away. Before he began devouring books at the Benson public library (he read through all the classics as an adolescent), he had long ago cultivated a love of music.

“I was born with this connection to sound. Music was so strong with me that as a toddler I could walk up to the radio or TV and tell you who was singing. My mother was into music. I was able to access her record collection, which had some of the best classical recordings you could get your hands on, and I learned it all — forwards and backwards. At home we had an Admiral TV with a turntable and four speakers. It had unbelievably good sound. I ran that system from grade school right into high school.”

He began studying the violin at age 9, but did not take his first private lesson until 12. While not quite a prodigy, he made an auspicious recital debut about a year later when he played the Mylnarski Mazurka without accompaniment. Then, in a rare feat, he joined the Omaha Symphony just out of high school in 1968 — as an 18-year-old — under the baton of conductor Joseph Levine. He received a graduate music fellowship to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. And as a junior in college he played the entire Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, Brahms First Sonata and First Bach Sonata unaccompanied and from memory.

After such early success, including two later stints with the Omaha Symphony under conductors Yuri Krasnapolsky (whom he adored) and Thomas Briccetti (whom he despised) and performing with the Opera Omaha Orchestra under such famous guest conductors as Arthur Fielder, Kelley quit the symphony scene and its “politics” to do his own thing.

He made himself persona non grata with the local symphony when he publicly questioned Briccetti’s credentials in a Sun Newspaper commentary. He discontinued the UNL fellowship in the midst of his first nervous breakdown. He rebounded to perform as a member of the David Majors and Myron Cohen String Quartets.

He also founded and performed in a string trio — Les Troi Cords — for which he wrote many arrangements. More recently, he has used his diverse connections to serve as “a catalyst” in putting together concert programs, including performances by the Mirecourt Trio and the Omaha Youth Orchestra at his alma mater (Benedictine) and organizing and performing in recitals, like one in 1997 at First Unitarian Church in Omaha featuring “outcast artists” like himself.

The iconoclastic journey Kelley has opted to take has been a difficult one, but he feels venturing off the beaten track to follow his muse and to find the truth has been worth it. “It’s become more creative every step of the way. I do what I love to do,” he said, a contented smile creasing his face.

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A Contrary Path to Social Justice: The De Porres Club and the fight for equality in Omaha

May 1, 2010 1 comment

 

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This article is an example of my social justice writing. The publisher of The Reader (www.thereader.com) asked me to do the piece because of his own social justice bent. I am glad I did the story, which was originally published in The Reader.  This is an expanded version of that story.  It profiles two men, John Markoe and Denny Holland, some followers, and their fight for equal rights in a discriminatory, intolerant time.

A Contrary Path to Social Justice

The De Porres Club and the Fight for Equality in Omaha

©by Leo Adam Biga

Originally appeared in The Reader (www.thereader.com)

For a band of troublemakers, they were an unimposing lot. Yet, in an era when defacto segregation ruled, a small, racially mixed group of well-scrubbed, mostly college-age reformers — many with little experience beyond the classroom — rose up in the late 1940s to challenge the embedded discrimination and division that defined Omaha then. Along the way, they forced Omaha to confront some unpleasant truths and to make some long overdue changes.

Using fairly bold strategies and tactics in the fight against racism, ones duplicated later by more famous civil rights campaigns down south, the activists were viewed as militants. Staging non-violent sit-ins, marches and boycotts, they helped overturn unfair employment practices and opened public places to all. In the process, they took on powerbrokers and exposed inequality. They made enemies. They fell short of goals. They won small victories. More importantly, they broke down barriers and initiated changes whose reverberations are still being felt today.

These unlikely radicals formed the De Porres Club. Its patron namesake was Blessed Martin de Porres, a 16th century black friar who devoted his life to serving the disadvantaged. Led by a stubborn old priest, Fr. John Markoe, and his loyal young acolyte, Denny Holland, the Club worked in large and small ways to assist minorities. It helped some find jobs. It distributed food and clothes. It acted on individual complaints about discrimination. It studied “the race problem” by organizing forums and gathering data. It rallied support for wrongfully accused persons. It kept vigils when blacks moved into hostile white areas. It launched public pressure campaigns against companies that did business in north Omaha and yet refused hiring blacks.

“The problem was to get the damn wall knocked down that was holding and locking people, both physically and mentally, in this terrible system racism had built on Omaha’s near north side,” said the late Denny Holland in Camille Steed’s 1992 Nebraska Educational Television documentary A Street of Dreams. “And so we turned our efforts to what some, I suppose, would term more militant” means.

In one of his most famous denouncements of racism, the late John Markoe said, “Racism is a God Damned thing. And that’s two words — God Damned.” In an article he penned for the Interracial Review, he said, “…the race problem is a moral one.”

The first De Porres boycott targeted a dry cleaners. When that action prompted the firm to integrate its employee rolls, the Club moved on to other employers. Faced with pickets, leaflets, petitions and boycotts, the Coca Cola Bottling plant, Reed’s Ice Cream Co. and the Omaha Street Railway Co. gave-in to De Porres demands and hired blacks. The Club took on its biggest target in the local board of education, which didn’t hire blacks to teach at the secondary level and excluded them from teaching in white schools altogether. The years-long fight finally got the desired remedy. The Club also got such businesses as Dixon’s Restaurant, Crosstown Skating Rink and Peony Park to open their facilities to everyone.

Walking the Talk and Lighting the Torch

In an era when the Catholic Church discouraged blacks from its own congregations, Catholics Markoe and Holland lived their faith. “They walked and talked what they believed in. They were very brazen and unusual” for the time, said Omaha Star publisher and editor Marguerita Washington, a De Porres member in the late ‘50s.

During the Club’s 14-year life, volunteers came and went. When Holland stepped aside, Wilbur Phillips took up the mantle. Most regard the work as a defining moment in their lives. For white De Porres veterans Agnes (Wichita) Stark, Millie (Heifner) Barnet and Virginia (Frederick) Walsh it was an eye-opening experience that sparked a lifelong commitment to social causes. “It was kind of a social awakening,” said Stark, a Creighton student at the time. “I didn’t realize all the problems that existed for blacks. I felt the injustice of it all. That’s how I got interested.” Barnet recalled going to her first De Porres meeting “and just in that one evening, I felt my whole world turned around. It was like suddenly I saw how appalling things were. I was immediately put in touch. It made quite an impact on my life.” For Walsh, “It made college so much more meaningful. I learned we had to change what could be changed. I was just glad to be part of it.” All three women credit the De Porres experience with, as Walsh said, “lighting a torch” for their later involvement in the women’s and peace movements.

Then there’s the effect blacks felt. “We not only formed a family, we got along very wonderfully. We tried our best to bring people together,” said Irv Poindexter, one of the Club’s youngest members. “You know what? It was the best thing that ever happened to Omaha’s black community,” said Helen Jones Woods, a member along with her late husband, Alfred. She said De Porres contributed “to better jobs and better advantages for blacks” — she and her husband included. “Today, I would say because of the De Porres Club a lot of places that didn’t want us, do now, or at least they tolerate us,” Washington said. “A lot of things I am doing today I couldn’t do then. It started changing things. It helped in ending Jim Crow.”

 

 

 

A Renegade

Unless one lived then, it’s hard to understand just how separate and unequal Omaha was for racial minorities. “Omaha had a bad reputation among African Americans,” said Washington, who was born and raised in Kansas City, Mo., but often visited Omaha, where she attended UNO. “The segregation here was very bad,” said Woods, who grew up in segregationist Mississippi.

Choose any quality of life index and blacks lagged far behind whites. On average, they made less money, lived in subpar housing and had less formal education. Blacks were frozen out of a wide spectrum of jobs, restricted to living in certain areas and refused service or admittance at many establishments. They were denied basic rights as part of an insidious, institutional Jim Crow culture that made segregation the rule, if not the law. An unspoken state of apartheid existed in all but name.

It was amidst this pervasive oppression the De Porres Club was born. It took an outsider to do it. De Porres founder John Markoe was a strapping, charismatic Jesuit priest regarded as a renegade by peers and superiors at Creighton University. A few years before, he’d been booted out of St. Louis, where he’d agitated for similar changes to the status quo. He’d also made waves in Detroit and Denver. In his life, his ministry and his writings, he attacked “the heresy of racism.”

Running against the current was a way of life with Markoe, who left behind the comforts of privilege for a hardscrabble life. Before ever joining the priesthood, he was a railroad foreman, an athlete, a cavalry officer, a lumberjack and a derelict. Alcoholism plagued him for years. During a checkered military career he rode in campaigns against rebel Yaqui Indians and Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. Between his drunken brawls — that saw him break up more than one bar and spend more than one night in jail — and his penchant for standing up for minorities, he was always in hot water. He was nearly expelled from West Point and was leading a 10th cavalry regiment of black troops when court martialled and relieved of both his command and commission.

His rebel ways followed him into the Jesuit order, where he became an unpopular champion of civil rights before the cause had a name. In 1917, he, his priest brother William Markoe and a third priest made a covenant “to give and dedicate our whole lives…for the salvation of the Negroes in the United States.” As he later did here, Markoe heeded this calling by immersing himself in the black districts in and around St. Louis, where he set up community centers, chapels and programs. After helping integrate St. Louis University, he was sent packing to Omaha.

Soon after forming the De Porres Club at Creighton in 1947, the group was kicked off campus. The Club next operated from a storefront on North 24th Street. The Omaha De Porres Center began as a grassroots social service mission before finding a niche as a social action group. Early on, center staff maintained a library, held youth programs and rallies and gathered clothes and food for the needy. As part of its education/advocacy calling, the Club: held public forums on racism; organized a lecture series featuring such nationally renown speakers as NAACP general secretary Walter White and baroness Catherine de Hueck, the founder of havens for the poor known as Friendship House; presented such anti-discrimination plays as Trial By Fire; and pressed city, civic and business leaders, to little avail, for more progressive policies. These efforts did spur the creation of a city human relations committee.

Although too controversial to be sanctioned by any religious body, the Club did draw many members from St. Benedict’s the Moor Catholic Church, then a separate “mission” church reserved for blacks, who were unwelcome anywhere else. Markoe and St. Benedict’s pastor, John Killoren, both sought a change at St. Ben’s from its mission status — which condoned segregation — to standard territorial standing. Their different approaches to the issue left them at odds when solidarity, not friction, was needed. In the end, St. Ben’s was made a regular parish church.

Allies

Markoe’s staunchest ally was Mildred Brown, founder, publisher and editor of the Omaha Star, which she made the group’s crusading mouthpiece. The Star printed  summaries of minutes from weekly Club meetings, featured stories charting the progress of De Porres actions and ran Club-penned editorials critical of racial bias. When the Club could no longer afford leasing space in its storefront site, Brown took in the orphaned group, who made the Star’s back rooms their offices.

As the Club became more entrenched, it allied itself with the local chapter of the NAACP, the Omaha Urban League and ministers of area black churches, who helped give the fledgling group credibility and spread word of its actions. A key De Porres supporter and advisor was Whitney Young, who left the directorship of the local Urban League to head the national organization. The Club also aligned itself with CORE, the national Congress for Racial Equality. De Porres chapters sprung up in Kansas City, Mo. and Denver, Co.

If Markoe was the De Porres Club’s conscience, then Denny Holland was its passion. Holland was a quiet Kansas World War II vet in whom Markoe saw a kindred contrariness. It was as a Creighton student Holland became a protege and confidante of Markoe’s and the Club’s original president. His social consciousness was peaked by a stint working at Chicago’s Friendship House. As he did there, he lived among the poor black residents he dedicated himself to, often boarding with families with whom he carried on the fight. Even after stepping away from the Club to work full-time as an insurance salesman and to raise a family of seven, he still kept watch and occasionally made waves.

Acting Against A Torrent of Disapproval

Markoe and Holland are gone now, but De Porres members well recall their guiding the struggle to get a resistant citizenry and leadership to do the right thing. Agnes Stark said Markoe was “a consummate leader” who “pushed us laggards along. Although a gentle man, he could get pretty angry.” Holland, meanwhile, was “very calm, always had the right words and was prepared. They worked very well together” in devising strategies, said Virginia Walsh.

The two men often began anti-discrimination campaigns by first appealing, either in person or by letter, to employers. De Porres delegations would meet with owners, managers or CEOs. If no corrective measure was taken, they organized more direct actions. They might hold a demonstration or distribute handbills. Or, in the case of the street-railway company, the public was urged to not ride streetcars and buses and, if they must, to wage a nuisance protest by paying the fare with 18 pennies.

They did all this in the face of criticism and opposition. Threats were made. Some suspected a snitch in the De Porres ranks. Holland’s suspicions that the phones were tapped, the mail monitored and certain members followed were more or less confirmed years later when his Freedom of Information/Privacy Act request netted a cache of FBI files that had been kept on he and the Club. Marguerita Washington said her aunt, Mildred Brown, was offered a top advertising post by a major Omaha employer on the condition she stop her civil rights advocacy in the Star.

“What we were doing was very much socially disapproved of,” said Walsh. She recalled soliciting signatures for a petition aimed at getting the transit system to hire black drivers. “People would say, emphatically, ‘No.’ They called us N…lovers. There was this confidence people had that God wanted it this way. I didn’t know religion could be used to justify a status quo so pernicious. Fr. Markoe was trying to reform the church at a time when it really didn’t want to be reformed.”

Early De Porres member Tessie Edwards said, “It was very scary, because the climate in Omaha was not ripe for” change. Markoe and Holland soldiered on despite having “doors slammed in their face. They had courage and commitment. And they convinced high-powered people this change was necessary,” she added.

In Street of Dreams, Holland described what it’s like pushing against stiff resistance. “It’s like you’re going up a mountain in a great big semi. All the tires are flat, and you’re the only one pushing and everybody that comes by says, Don’t go too fast. The problem isn’t going too fast, the problem is — can you move the damn thing? You soon see that what’s inferred by don’t go to fast is — don’t change anything.”

Markoe had seen it before elsewhere and anticipated Omaha’s opposition. He even welcomed it, writing it was evidence the Club had “at least done something.” to get people’s attention. He also wrote about his own precarious role: “The leader in the field of interracial relations is pretty much like an acrobat walking the tightrope of justice, supported by charity. His only safe course is a straight line. Let him lean too far towards either side, and he loses his balance and falls.”

The priest encouraged members to carry the fight with them wherever they went. For example, interracial groups would go to eateries and occupy a counter or table. “We would be told to go to the back…and we’d refuse to go,” Millie Barnet said. Sometimes, they were harassed. Once, Barnet said, a member flung a donut in disgust and was arrested on trumped-up assault charges. When his court hearing came up, a throng of De Porres supporters were in attendance. The case was thrown out. More often than not, Agnes Stark said, “we wouldn’t get waited on, but eventually they (eateries) came around” after a bit of discussion. If a proprietor didn’t comply, he was reminded of the law. If he still didn’t, a warrant was sworn out for his arrest. The Club rarely, if ever, lost a case.

Working on the front lines of racial justice often elicited raised eye brows and nasty remarks even among De Porres members’ friends and family. “I felt like an outcast,” Barnet said. “My parents looked askance at my involvement,” Stark said.

The Club’s interracial makeup was not for appearances sake. It was practical. Agitating for change was “fraught with hazards” for blacks, who were considered second class citizens, said Walsh. Besides, it was intimidating for anyone to go up against prevailing social mores and the entities that enforced them. “I was scared spitless when we were doing this work,” said Walsh, who was part of a De Porres delegation rebuffed by officials at old St. Catherine’s Hospital for questioning their segregation and hiring policies. “It was so frightening to buck social customs when the highest level of authority in organizations like the school board and the archdiocese approved of segregation.”

 

 

Filling the Void

A challenge made all the more daunting, Walsh said, as the city’s conservative daily newspaper, the Omaha World-Herald, imposed a veritable news “black out” on “all the things that would have contributed to social justice. Reading the Herald, you would have thought the civil rights movement never happened.” When her husband Tom Walsh met with a top Herald editor to discuss inequality, she said he was met with indifference. The same “don’t rock the boat” response came from the archbishop, say De Porres members. Walsh said that when her mother, Mary Frederick, asked Omaha Public Schools superintendent Harry Burke to assign black teachers to white schools, “he told her, ‘Over my dead body.’”

Years later, a federal court found the Omaha Public Schools guilty of a decades-long pattern of segregation and ordered the desegregation of its schools. Much of the evidence in the lawsuit brought against OPS was supplied by the De Porres Club’s own Denny Holland and Wilbur Phillips, who remained ever vigilant watchdogs.

De Porres actions didn’t always didn’t always get the intended results, but at least they tried to affect change when no one else dared or cared to act.

“What they did right was having a mixed group of dedicated, responsible people that followed through on their ideas and were unafraid to tell the truth and speak out, with concrete examples, of injustice,” Tessie Edwards said. Prior to Markoe, Holland and company, she said, “There was no one here to say, Let’s lift these people higher. There was no one asking, Do they all have to work service jobs? Do they all have to live in one segregated area? They educated Omaha on a level Omaha had not been educated on before. They raised the awareness of Omaha to the problems. So many people in Omaha had their head in the sand. They did not think there was a problem here. The De Porres Club really opened the doors.”

Agnes Stark said the De Porres Club was the impetus Omaha needed then. “It was moving things forward that were just at a standstill.”

By the 1960s, Markoe was ill and the Club on its way out. New voices were speaking out for change, including the Citizens Coordinating Committee for Civil Liberties, or 4CL, a religious-secular coalition led by black churches that staged large demonstrations for fair employment and housing policies.

The Men Behind the Mission

The driving force behind the Club was the enigmatic Markoe. He not only preferred working behind the scenes, but had to since he was persona non grata within official Catholic circles. Protest letters from the Club were signed by Holland but often written by Markoe. Even though Markoe kept a low profile, Tessie Edwards said his presence was always felt and his commitment never swayed.

“Father set the example,” Edwards said. “When he finished teaching for the day, he’d take off his Roman color and put on his nice Panama hat and walk North 24th Street. He’d be sitting on the steps of storefronts talking to people. He’d talk to bums and alcoholics. He visited the homes of poor people. He could see the need because he’d hit bottom himself. Part of the Jesuit philosophy is being a man for others. How can you be a man for others if you don’t know them and their hurt? He really did. He loved people. If you asked him a question, he gave you a straight answer. He didn’t just try to proselytize. He was tough. He said things to people at the bottom and at the top that the average person wouldn’t say.”

Virginia Walsh recalled the “very forceful” yet “gentle” and “completely persuasive” Markoe. Helen Jones Woods recalled Markoe as the man who arranged a loan for her to attend nursing school, encouraged her husband to pursue an accounting degree at Creighton and sponsored their daughter Cathy at Duschene Academy. “He did a lot for young people.” Marguerita Washington said Markoe stood tall: “As far as African Americans who were interested in the movement were concerned, he was a hero. As far as I was concerned, he was some type of saint.”

For much of his life, he was a contentious figure. Only later in life were he and his work recognized as righteous. The legacy of Markoe, like De Porres, lives on. Roger Bergman, director of Creighton’s Justice and Peace Studies Program, said that as Markoe’s been “rehabilitated” in Jesuit circles, he’s gained honored status within the order and the wider social justice-peace community. In ‘94, Bergman began the Markoe Lecture Series. “Ever since Fr. Markoe, Creighton has made it a major concern to reach out to the (black) community,” said Edwards. She and others also credit him with helping more widely integrate the campus. Markoe died in 1967.

Denny Holland also casts a long shadow. Before his death in 2003, he was honored with a humanitarian award by the organization formerly known as the National Conference for Christians and Jews. “He was a torch bearer. He was a remarkable gift to the city of Omaha,” Walsh said. In later life, Holland worked on human relations committees, aided a scholarship program for blacks, volunteered at Sacred Heart Parish and found a new crop of troublemakers with whom to stir things up in Omaha Together One Community. He also penned protest articles.

When the De Porres Club disbanded in the early ‘60s, civil rights laws were being shaped and the black power movement formed. De Porres veterans could see the fruit of their labors. Public places were integrated and blacks were employed in jobs and living in areas once off-limits to them. A foundation had been laid. A dialogue begun. The late ‘60s riots that torched black communities like Omaha’s were an expression of a people’s rage over continued oppression. “It kind of had to happen that way,” Holland said of the riots. “Change doesn’t come smoothly. Change only comes, it seems to me, with a threat or with a bit of violence.”

All these years later, the pro-active, interracial coalition that was the De Porres Club remains a model for achieving social justice and economic parity. As one black Omaha leader said, “It’s not so much what ‘they’re’ going to do for us, it’s more about a partnership of what we’re all going to do together — to affect change.”

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Categories: African-American Culture, Civil Rights, Creighton University, History, Omaha, Race, Social Justice, Writing Tags: , , , , , , , , ,