When I learned in my teen years to put thoughts together, racial issues kept showing up in my life. A strong influence in my whole life, not just on race, were the movies. One that comes to mind was Pinky, with Jeanne Crain playing a black girl who can pass as white. Even at 13 I was struck by how unjustly she was treated. Books such as Black Like Me kept me thinking about the unfair limitations placed on black people. The book is written by a white man who dyes his skin dark and records how differently he is treated because of the color of his skin.
An incident when I was in seminary high school left an indelible impression on me and started me on the road to action. I went with three of my classmates, one of whom was black, to a soda fountain. We ordered banana splits. When the waitress served us, she said my black friend would have to eat his outside. We all carried our banana splits outside and dumped them on the sidewalk and went away without paying.
There was a black man from Baltimore ordained with us Baltimore seminarians. He had had to study for a diocese in Alabama because the archbishop of Baltimore at the time would not accept him to study for Baltimore. He had asked to be ordained in Baltimore so a lot of his family could afford to come see him ordained a priest. Cardinal Shehan, the new archbishop who ordained us, expressed his regrets to the young man that he had not been allowed to study for Baltimore.
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