User:Lavendercrayons/Carolyn's Hesburgh Project

It was 1957, and the African-American Civil Rights Movement was underway. This year, marked by the Little Rock Nine incident [picture of Little Rock Nine and troops], had been three years since segregation in public schools was ruled illegal [picture of mother and child sitting on steps of Capitol]; two since Rosa Parks [picture of Rosa Parks] refused to give up her seat; and only one since the end of the [picture of the Rosa Parks bus] Montgomery Bus Boycotts. These were violent times in the United States.

But the 1957 formation of the United States Commission on Civil Rights created an opportunity for hope, particularly with the appointment of its future president: Reverend Theodore Martin Hesburgh.

Father Hesburgh was born into a Catholic family in Syracuse in 1917. He studied at the University of Notre Dame and became a member of its faculty in 1943. In 1952, he became the University's President [picture of Fr. Hesburgh in front his namesake library at Notre Dame]. Father Hesburgh would eventually be the University's longest serving president, with a term lasting until 1987.

The purpose of the Commission was to report the status of civil rights in the United States, though, predictably, most of the activity that concerned the committee took place in the South. In one Georgia incident of police brutality, James Brazier, an African-American, was arrested for speeding, and a police officer, reported only as “Y”, beat him and made racial slurs. The Commission reported about this and police brutality towards African-Americans in Justice, the last of five volumes in the Commission’s second report. Events like these prompted Hesburgh’s words, "Personally, I d on't care if the U.S. gets the first man on the moon if while this is happening on a crash basis we dawdle along here on our corner of the earth, nursing our prejudices, flouting our magnificent Constitution, ignoring the central moral problem of our times, and appearing hypocrites to all the world."

Before Hesburgh’s term as chairman, his role in the Commission was, in his words, “the house philosopher and theologian.” But it was also, it seems, the “voice of the helpless”. Father Hesburgh was a particularly outspoken member of the Commission – he recalls in his autobiography, God, Country, Notre Dame, that, because the Commission’s reports were supposed to be objective, his personal emotional statements usually had to be put in the back. He also used his voice and his connections with presidents to achieve justice. Hesburgh served under nine administrations, but two in which he and the Commission had particular influences on the country were the administrations of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. Dwight Eisenhower was president during the foundation of the Commission, and he was also a friend of Hesburgh. Knowing Eisenhower was beneficial to Hesburgh, since he and the Commission, having both black and white members, were not able to find accommodation in Montgomery, Alabama, the site of one of their civil rights hearings, so it took an Executive Order from Eisenhower to get the group accommodated at the Maxwell Air Force Base. The Commission’s hearings on voting in places like Mississippi; Texas; New Orleans; and Montgomery, Alabama, sought to listen to witnesses tell about how they had been disenfranchised; return voting rights to those in the area who had been denied the privilege; and report their findings. But arguably, the Montgomery trial stood out most of all. The reason that this trial stood out was partly that it involved one George Wallace, at that time Judge George Wallace, to turn over the county voting records. Wallace refused, so Hesburgh and the Commission forced him, through the legal power of the local federal judge, Frank Johnson. Johnson made Wallace turn over the records, and, as a result, sixteen hundred blacks were registered as voters.

Hesburgh’s influence during Nixon’s administration would be a surprise to most people, considering how large an impact it had on the country’s history. In a 1969 meeting with Richard Nixon, Hesburgh suggested to Nixon four things he thought would help improve the country, all of which Nixon later put into effect or supported: (1)	Ending the Vietnam War, which he did in 1973; (2)	Giving eighteen-year-olds the right to vote, which became the 26th Amendment to the Bill of Rights in 1971 (3)	Abolishing the draft and creating an all-volunteer army; (4)	Creating a federal higher education student loan program, known today as “FAFSA.”

But as the battle for civil rights was reaching full swing, a new battle for freedom had begun: the battle for women's rights. This "second-wave" feminist movement was jumpstarted by Betty Friedan's book [image of The Feminine Mystique] The Feminine Mystique. In this book, Friedan asserted that women had become victims of the common belief [quick shots of seven different advertisements from that time] that women who became stay-at home mothers had fulfilling lives.

Although Hesburgh's contribution to the movement was not as pioneering, nor as widely recognized, as Friedan's, it was still important. In 1972, Hesburgh formally admitted women to undergraduate studies at Notre Dame. The problem with this was that Notre Dame had long been a symbol of masculinity, almost completely because of its football reputation and traditions: Knute Rockne, the legend of the Four Horsemen, pride in the "Fighting Irish,” and the image of "a Notre Dame man" made the school a haven for virility. Hesburgh's contribution showed that even a "manly" school such as Notre Dame could be open to progress.

Of course, not all on campus were open to the change. As Hesburgh once said, " You cannot take an all-male tradition that is well over a century old and make it disappear overnight." Female students had to deal with the "Better Dead than Coed" movement, led by football star James Lynch. In the cafeteria, men held up signs rating female students’ attractiveness, and some professors refused to teach women. Kat hleen Cekanski-Ferrand, the first female rector of a Notre Dame women's residence hall, remembers that female undergrads had to put up with, quote, “some pretty cutting remarks, when they walked into class at first. Several of them were told that they were taking up the spot that would have gone to someone's brother. We dealt with that by being as positive as we could be until the boys got to know them [sic]. The girls couldn't retreat."

Despite the controversy, the step of admitting women into Notre Dame has been a long-term gain, having produced many women who have had an impact on their communities. More notable graduates include: Anne Thompson, now Chief Environmental Correspondent for MSNBC news; Kelley Tuthill, anchor of WCVB news in Boston; and Condoleezza Rice, the first female African-American Secretary of State. Secretary Rice even spoke at a celebration of Father Hesburgh’s 90th birthday, saying, “[H]e also called us not just to educate ourselves and to be good students, but he called us to our great moral side.”

Additionally, this October 2007 event not only celebrated Father Hesburgh’s 90th birthday, but something of arguably equal significance: the acceptance of a photograph of Hesburgh into the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. The picture in question is of Hesburgh at a 1964 Chicago civil rights rally holding hands with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., singing “We Shall Overcome”. It represents the different facets of Hesburgh: he wears his priestly collar; he is “out in the world”, but not too far from Notre Dame; and he is speaking out for civil rights. He is trying to make the world a better place – “on Earth as it is in Heaven”.