Religion and Politics, Fear Of The Unknown!

There were no Catholics in our town before JFK. If there were, none of the children in my pack knew about them. It was rumored that they had a Christian church in town somewhere behind the local Type A & P, but I never establish it. I was already in my teens before I saw my first existent life Catholic. He didn't look much different than me, but my female parent acted like I had spoken to the anti-Christ himself!

As a child growing up in the South in the early '60s, our Christian church was the Negro spiritual centre of our universe. My household was all Southern Baptists, as were most of my friends. A few familiarities of mine went to the Methodist Church and one to a Church of God. We just didn't cognize any Catholics and probably would've been afraid of them if 1 had showed up on our door step.

I don't believe they were really hiding; it's just that no one paid them any attention. That all changed when Toilet F. Jack Kennedy became President of the United States of America! My Lord'S Day School instructor at that time, speaking for many in the south, declared in a awful voice that the 1960 presidential race could intend the end to Christian Religion as we knew it! There was a Catholic running for that high business office and as far as she was concerned, he was the Satan himself and she knew without a uncertainty that we would all travel to Hell if he were elected!

The Book belt at that clip was against anyone or anything that promised change. Toilet F. Jack Kennedy wasn't a Baptist, Methodist, Church of Jesus or even Pentecostal! He was an foreigner and not to be trusted with the leading of our country!

These sentiments belonged to many in the South during that decennary and they weren't confined to Lord'S Day school teachers. Sociable alterations are often served on the same platter with fearfulness of the unknown. A different wind was definitely blowing through our southern cotton wool fields.

With President Jack Kennedy in the White Person House, mental attitudes in the South slowly began to change; not over night. There was civil agitation in many parts of the country, a warfare in Viet Nam and we began to happen Catholics everywhere in our small town! In fact, folks we'd known for old age were now proudly admitting to being Catholic! This was portion of the alteration that was taking topographic point throughout the country.

Most of the crowd I ran with, having been sheltered from anything that mightiness have got been considered societal or Negro spiritual advancement, soon establish that our newly discovered Catholic friends were still the good folks they were before JFK! One of my buddies at the clip went to Mass every Lord'S Day but I never knew that until after the Toilet Jack Jack Kennedy was elected president.

Sadly in the south, President Toilet F. Kennedy was blamed for every perceived trouble that anyone faced at that time. While not through his first term as president, he was assassinated in Dallas, Lone-Star State one bright November afternoon in 1963.

Everyone who was living at that clip cognizes exactly where and what they were doing when they heard news of the shooting. I was working for a residential edifice company at the time, carrying fresh concrete blocks to the dorsum of the house we were building, where they would be hauled to the adjacent job.

We had a radiocommunication scene on a stack of brick and Saint George Mother Jones was vocalizing when the music was interrupted by a sombre voice telling us that President Jack Kennedy had been shot an hr before in Texas.

I remember as vividly as if it were yesterday that there was a twelve manual laborers and brick Masons working, including me, when the proclamation was made. There was a minute of aghast silence and then a loud and strident cheer went up from the manual laborers and brick Masons working on the house.

"I trust the S.O.B. dies!" yelled one of them.


"They ought to give the cat who shot him a medal!" screamed another.


"It's about clip person had the backbone to kill that S.O.B." shouted a cat with a shovel in his hands.

Those were a few of the nicer remarks from a bluish neckband workings crew in the South at the time. I've often wondered if President Jack Kennedy had announced that he was a Baptist, Methodist or Presbyterian, would he have got sparked such as indignation in the south. Maybe, maybe not. I think I'll never know.