Today, October 19th would have been my mother Stephanie’s 118th Birthday. She was born October 19, 1908. She died at the age of 52 on February 5, 1961 after a two-week illness from kidney failure. I was 17 years old and a senior in high school at Quigley Seminary in Chicago. Sixteen days beforehand on January 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy took the Oath of Office as President.
Across the South, African Americans faced strict segregation, voter disenfranchisement, and many acts of violence. Freedom Riders were being brutally attacked in Alabama and other Southern states. In the North, Blacks endured widespread discrimination in housing, employment and education.
My mother was buried from St. John Brebeuf Parish in Niles, Illinois. People in Niles had just forced a young, well-educated Black accountant and his wife to leave town due to threats and bricks thrown through their windows. On my occasional trips to see the Cubs and the Bears play at Wrigley Field, my ears often buzzed with the N-word throughout the afternoon.
Two months after my mother died, in April 1961 President Kennedy authorized 1,400 covert Cuban exiles for the Bay of Pigs Invasion to overthrow Fidel Castro’s Communist government. The operation failed disastrously after Kennedy withheld direct U.S. Air support. That April I took my first airplane flight to Washington and returned home from New York for our senior high school trip. It crossed my mind that if the plane crashed, I could be with my mother again.
In August 1961 Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union peaked when East Germany erected the Berlin Wall. At the same time President Kennedy began sending thousands of “military advisors” to assist South Vietnam against Viet Cong guerillas.
In September 1961 I started Niles College Seminary. Five blocks North on Harlem Avenue was our family home. Five blocks to the South at St. Adalbert’s Cemetery was my mother’s grave.
Sixty-Five Years Later: What Has Really Changed?
Sixty-five years later, we as a nation have often been forced by laws to make progress. But discrimination persists, human dignity is still threatened throughout our country, and useless wars continue to destroy so many innocent lives.
Sometimes I wonder: Sixty-five years after I am gone from this world, what will have changed in the world as I knew it?
Will people still judge others by the color of their skin? Will nations still settle disagreements by killing one another? Will people ever get tired of dictators and autocrats ordering them around as they themselves feather their own nests? Will we as humans finally recognize that every human being is a child of God?
Jesus gave us the answer two thousand years ago: “Love one another as I have loved you.” The tragedy is not that we don’t know what Jesus taught. It’s that we still struggle to live it.
As November’s election approaches, we should ask ourselves which choices on my ballot will best advance human dignity, justice, peace, and the common good?
I think of my mother today. My Christian faith assures me that death does not have the final word. Someday, I hope to see her again.
But until then, I still have work to do. The best way for me to honor my mother is to leave behind a world more loving than the one that she brought me into.
You heard my story. How are YOU working to make this world a better place than the world your mother brought you into?
AIM AT HEAVEN AND YOU WILL GET EARTH THROWN IN. AIM AT EARTH AND YOU WILL GET NEITHER!
