Catholics and the Campaign for Racial Justice in San Francisco

From Pearl Harbor to Proposition 14

©American Catholic Studies
Vol. 119, No. 3 (Fall 2008)

William Issel
Professor Emeritus, San Francisco State University
Visiting Professor, Mills College
Mailing address: 1228 Carleton St., Berkeley, CA 94702
Email: bi@sfsu.edu

Mary Anne Wold
History Department, Lowell High School, San Francisco

Note:  A fully annotated version of this essay can be obtained by writing to Issel at the email address above.

Abstract

This article revisits the question of the extent to which Catholics participated in civil rights work in San Francisco, the second largest city of the Western United States at the midpoint of the twentieth century. The authors cover a longer time period and draw upon more extensive archival and oral history sources than previous accounts to argue that Catholics played an active and constructive role in the city’s racial justice campaign from the World War II years to the high point of racial liberalism in the mid 1960s. Catholic activists, lay men and women alike, were present at the creation of the equal rights campaign in 1942 when they helped organize the Bay Area Council Against Discrimination. The laity and clerical activists (supported by their archbishops) helped publicize the importance of racial equality during and after World War II and contributed to the establishment of local and state equal rights legislation during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. The article concludes with an analysis of Catholics in the campaign for and against California’s fair housing legislation during the early 1960s.

On the morning of November 4, 1964, San Francisco Chronicle headlines proclaimed "Big Johnson Victory; Solid Murphy Lead; Prop 14 Passes." The United States expressed its confidence in the incumbent president, as Lyndon Johnson crushed Barry Goldwater in a sweeping victory. The Golden State gained a new senator, as movie star George Murphy defeated former J.F.K. press secretary, Pierre Salinger.  And California lost its newly established fair housing act, as voters by a two-to-one margin endorsed a constitutional amendment to nullify the law. Given the morality play character of this no-holds-barred contest between the defenders of a state law requiring racial equality in housing and opponents of such a mandate, it is not surprising that Northern California’s leading daily newspaper announced the passage of Proposition 14 (Prop 14) in front page headlines.

How did San Francisco Catholics respond to the question of whether California would preserve or repudiate its 1963 anti-discrimination housing law? What role did Catholics play in their community’s racial justice campaigns during the period from A. Philip Randolph’s 1941 March on Washington Movement to the mid-1960s, when the passage of federal civil rights and voting rights laws marked the high point of success for racial liberalism? The topic has intrinsic importance in the light of the city’s large Catholic population and the relatively high levels of power, privilege, and prestige they enjoyed in what was in the middle of the twentieth century the second largest city of the Western United States. The subject is even more compelling in the light of the relative lack of research on the encounter of white Catholics in the Far West with the American "race question" in the mid-twentieth century.

The Catholic response to the racial justice campaigns occurred in the context of dramatic changes in San Francisco’s population and a consequent twenty-year long battle over the extent to which government policy should be used to break down existing barriers to racial equality in the private and public spheres. From the beginning of the twentieth century until World War II, nonwhite residents constituted a small number and proportion of both the Catholic population and the general city population. Irish, German, and Italian immigrants, their children, and their grandchildren made up nearly two-thirds of a population that was some 95 percent of white European background. In the 1930s, about 3 percent were Chinese, Japanese and Filipino; another 1.2 percent was born in Mexico or of Mexican descent; only 0.6 percent were African American.

New demographic realities in the decade after Pearl Harbor brought unexpected challenges to San Francisco’s white population and its customary social relations practices. Black migrants poured into San Francisco and the Bay Area in response to job opportunities. The city’s African American population increased from 4,846 in 1940 to 43,502 in 1950, 74,383 in 1960, and 89,400 in 1964. Bay Area African American numbers also increased: from 19,759 in 1940 to 328,754 in 1960. The city’s share of ethnic minority residents generally put it well ahead of the Bay Area as a whole. The city’s white population declined from 85 percent to 57 percent of the total between 1950 and the 1970s. The black share increased from 5 to 13 percent, the Asian American from 4 to 13 percent, and the Hispanic from about 2 to 14 percent.

At the end of World War II, the city’s Chinese residents, Japanese families returning from internment camps, Filipinos, Hispanics, and tens of thousands of black newcomers found themselves confronted with both a severe housing shortage and San Francisco’s historical pattern of robust racial prejudice and institutionalized racial discrimination. Entire neighborhoods were still off limits to all but white residents; access to jobs, health care, education, and cultural opportunities continued to be difficult and sometimes impossible unless one qualified as white. Many if not most white residents expected Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, African American, and Hispanic residents to continue living within their segregated enclaves and acquiescing in their subordinate status. Mayor Roger D. Lapham asked Thomas Fleming, the editor of The Sun Reporter, an African American newspaper at the end of the war, "how long you think these colored people are going to be here"? Fleming replied "they’re here to stay, and the city fathers may as well make up their minds to find housing and jobs for these people. Because they ain't going back down to the Jim Crow South."

Resumption of the status quo ante bellum was not to be, because San Francisco liberal reformers had launched a wartime assault on theories of racial superiority and on the social, economic, political, and cultural expression of such notions in the conduct of public affairs and private business in the city. Prominent Catholic clergy and lay men and women, with the support of their Archbishop, participated in the mobilization against the discrimination faced by the city’s ethnic minorities at a time when the nation proclaimed to the world its abhorrence of racial superiority doctrines and its revitalized definition of human rights – as applying to all regardless of race, religion, color, and creed. San Francisco Catholics did not speak in one voice then anymore than they do today, but in early 1942 Catholic racial liberals joined with Protestant and Jewish civil rights activists, and made common cause with members of ethnic minority rights organizations, when they helped establish the Bay Area Council Against Discrimination. This was nine months before American Catholic Bishops expressed "paternal solicitude for American Negroes" working in the war industries in their November 1942 "Victory and Peace" statement. One year later, the Bishops issued another pastoral letter acknowledging the "millions of fellow citizens of the Negro race." who deserved "not only political equality, but also fair economic and educational opportunity, a just share in public welfare projects, good housing without exploitation, and a full chance for social advancement." The Bishops also declared that it was the "duty of a citizen to try to relieve racial tension,"

San Francisco Catholics joined, took leadership positions in, and made financial contributions to, the Council Against Discrimination and its successors, the Mayor’s Council for Civic Unity and the San Francisco Council for Civic Unity. Their numbers included Harold Boyd, the city controller; attorney Maurice Harrison, Democratic Party

Committeeman and founding member of the St. Thomas More Society; Lucy McWilliams, a Depression Decade farm worker rights advocate and her husband Judge Robert McWilliams; American Federation of Labor activists John F. Shelley (state senator, congressman, and city mayor) and John Henning (California State Federation of Labor); Father (later Auxiliary Bishop) Hugh A. Donohoe; Paulist Father Thomas Burke, pastor of Old St. Mary’s Church.

Lucy McWilliams chaired the Council Against Discrimination, helped organize the Council for Civic Unity, and she and other Catholic laymen and women actively participated in these citywide organizations, all of which worked in concert with and pursued moderate programs of racial liberalism compatible with the centrist philosophies of local ethnic rights associations. These included the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Congress, the March on Washington Movement of A. Philip Randolph, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Urban League, the Chinese American Citizens Alliance, and the Japanese American Citizens League. Archbishop John J. Mitty (served 1935 to 1961) appointed Father Donohoe as Archdiocesan representative to the Civic Unity Council, and he delegated Father Burke to speak at a variety of non-Catholic public events.

By the time the American Bishops issued the November 1958 pastoral letter "Discrimination and Christian Conscience" reminding Catholics that "Discrimination based on the accident of race or color cannot be reconciled with God’s creation of man," San Francisco liberal Catholics had more than a decade of experience as civil rights advocates. They included Terry A. Francois, an African American Catholic, a 1940 Xavier University, New Orleans, graduate who moved to San Francisco after his discharge from the Marine Corps in 1946. Francois immediately immersed himself in civil rights activity. In 1950, with a University of California Hastings School of Law degree in hand, he joined the boards of directors of both the local NAACP and the national Catholic Interracial Council. Francois was a member of the Interracial Communion League at St. Benedict the Moor Church, a parish organization approved by Archbishop Mitty in 1952. Father Bruno Drescher, the pastor of the church, which stood in the heart of the Western Addition African American community, was a civil rights stalwart who served on the Council for Civic Unity board. Francois was also instrumental in obtaining the Archbishop’s approval of a San Francisco branch of the national Catholic Interracial Council in 1960.

In 1952, Francois and his law partners Loren Miller and Nathaniel Colley successfully challenged the city Housing Authority’s policy of racial segregation in public housing projects before the Superior Court, whose decision was upheld by the federal district court in 1953. Francois also served as NAACP local president. With Edward Howden and Irving Rosenblatt of the Council for Civic Unity, Francois convinced the San Francisco Employers’ Council to join with local labor unions in support of a pioneering city ordinance creating the 1957 Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity (CEEO), the third such agency in California. Francois and his coreligionist John F. Henning were appointed two of the five members of the first CEEO. In 1964 Francois became the first African American to serve on the Board of Supervisors when Mayor Shelley (a native San Franciscan and practicing Catholic who was also active in the local civil rights movement) appointed him to that position.

The city’s private University of San Francisco (USF), a Jesuit institution, developed institutional relationships with the NAACP, National Urban League, and other civil rights organizations during the first decade after the war, and these relationships increasingly brought Catholic San Franciscans into contact with the local civil rights movement. Father Andrew C. Boss, director of the University’s Labor-Management School, put USF squarely on the side of employment-related equal rights activism. Like Father Donohoe, Mayor Shelley, and many other San Francisco natives who took seriously the Church’s gradually more outspoken commitment to racial justice, Boss grew up in a blue-collar working class family in the city’s Mission district. The Labor-Management School opened its doors in the spring of 1948, after Boss and Father Donohoe decided that the city needed a Catholic alternative to the California Labor School, because Communist Party members dominated the administration and the curriculum of the California Labor School. This was the same year that Donohoe became Auxiliary Bishop and a member of the executive board of the Civic Unity Council.

During the decade between the founding of the school and the passage of the city CEEO, Father Boss opened the pages of the School’s periodical, Labor Management Panel to articles by local black and other nonwhite civil rights leaders. He also organized conferences to expose discrimination in employment and generate support for the state fair employment legislation. The USF events provided a forum for conservative opponents of liberal civil rights legislation as well as an opportunity for its supporters to spread their gospel. In an April 1951 Institute on Minority Group Employment, for instance, Adrien Falk, then president of the California Chamber of Commerce criticized the legislative approach and called instead for strictly voluntary job training and skill development initiatives by employers. Falk, a leader among those who defended property-rights against the alleged violation of freedom inherent in mandatory equal rights legislation, persisted in this argument all the way to the passage of the city ordinance in 1957.

One of the Labor-Management School’s civil rights programs, a panel discussion broadcast on radio station KNBC in January 1954, featured D. Donald Glover, industrial relations secretary of the city’s Urban League branch. Judge Sylvester McAtee, another discussant, raised the issue of the Communist Party’s influence in the civil rights movement. John F. Henning, a 1939 St. Mary’s College graduate, then research director of the California State Federation of Labor, also appeared on the program. In August 1957, Henning would join Terry Francois on the city CEEO, and in 1959 Governor Brown appointed Henning the Director of the California Department of Industrial Relations. Now Henning bristled at McAtee’s claim that "FEP [Fair Employment Practices] legislation provides the ideal opportunity for propaganda by … communists …who wish to create racial animosities, and employer-employee conflict." Henning responded: "On this matter of associating the drive for racial justice in this country with any Communist purpose. The Communist apparatus must be opposed if democracy is to survive but to exploit the issue and associate the campaign for racial justice with the Communist movement is actually the last refuge of those who are morally sterile and philosophically bankrupt."

The state Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) bill passed five years later, on April 16, 1959. The campaign to pass the legislation began with the Council Against Discrimination and the Civic Unity Council discussion and drafts of legislation in the early to mid-1940s. Liberal Catholics participated in all phases of the lengthy campaign, including work in the labor, minority, and religious coalition chaired by C. L. Dellums of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the uncle of future congressman Ron Dellums. Augustus Hawkins and Byron Rumford, African American members of the California State Assembly, saw the bill through the legislature. By the time the state FEPC began its work in 1959, Catholic civil rights advocates and their liberal colleagues had also desegregated San Francisco’s public housing projects, won an anti-discrimination clause in urban redevelopment housing policy, and successfully campaigned to establish the city Council on Equal Employment Opportunity.

White liberal Catholics who participated in the civil rights movement of the forties and fifties prepared the ground for further legislative victories at the local, state and federal levels during the 1960s, but these later accomplishments did not represent a simple continuity with the racial liberalism of the postwar years. The United States experienced considerable turmoil during the Sixties, if not quite the "civil war" that some historians have asserted, and the Catholic Church itself underwent significant change related to the Second Vatican Council. Several local developments between the 1959 FEPC fight and the 1964 Prop 14 campaign complicated the ways in which San Franciscans experienced what historian Philip Gleason has characterized as a period of "frenzied agitation, whose intensity was heightened for Catholics by the merging together of the religious crisis and the society-wide political cultural crises." In April 1963, Berkeley history professor Raymond Sontag identified the complexities that were emerging when he noted that at the very moment Catholics might be experiencing a desire to "fit in" as they became more accepted in the American mainstream, they had a duty to be "different" from the mainstream by insisting upon the kind of uncompromising racial justice called for by Church teaching on race.

Archbishop Mitty approved the establishment of a local branch of the Catholic Interracial Council in 1960; Mitty died in 1961 and his successor Joseph T. McGucken (served 1962 to 1977) established an official Archdiocesan Social Justice Commission in 1964. Behind the seeming continuity, considerable change took place. Between 1960 and 1964, several charismatic leaders left San Francisco. Bishop Donohoe, whose leadership in the Civic Unity Council had legitimized Catholic participation in the city’s equal rights campaign left to become the head of the newly formed Diocese of Stockton. John F. Henning, whose leadership in the fair employment fight had inspired Catholic working men and women to participate in civil rights work left to become Under Secretary of Labor in Washington, D.C. Also, a local grassroots challenge to Church authority emerged even as the Second Vatican Council proceedings encouraged the displacement of the traditional deferential mode of Catholic Action by a new change-oriented critical approach. This occurred when the new Archbishop’s $9 million dollar cathedral that replaced the burned-down Neo-Gothic St. Mary’s was picketed by a small but media-savvy cadre of angry Catholic clergy and lay men and women. They claimed that the cathedral was an ostentatious architectural showpiece out of place in the City of St. Francis; worse, they alleged, it was built at the expense of poor African American families who had been displaced by the redevelopment of the area. The protesters also criticized the Archbishop for failing to make a public condemnation of the segregated skilled building trades unions whose members were building the cathedral; McGucken, they argued, should have seized the opportunity to demand faster progress toward racial integration in the labor movement.

Members of the relatively new local chapter of the Catholic Interracial Council were among the most outspoken critics of Archbishop McGucken. The new organization was approved by Archbishop Mitty in 1960, and Father Eugene Boyle became their chaplain two years later. At the time, Boyle was a forty-one year old diocesan priest who had caught the eye of Archbishop Mitty in the mid-1950s; Mitty assigned him to the Archdiocesan Mission Band, the adult education outreach program that recruited Cesar Chavez into labor and civil rights work. Boyle also founded and moderated a KCBS radio dialogue program that analyzed "the moral aspects of current issues," including civil rights and civil liberties. When Martin Luther King Jr.’s room in Birmingham’s Gaston Motel was destroyed by a bomb in May 1963, Boyle overcame his reservations about protest marches and joined other religious leaders and lay men and women in a demonstration at San Francisco City Hall. The following year saw Boyle, and his CIC colleague John Delury, a USF graduate, assume leadership of Archbishop McGucken’s new Archdiocesan Social Justice Commission. At the same time, following in the footsteps of Bishop Donohoe, Boyle co-founded a city-wide Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish Conference on Religion, Race, and Social Concerns. The new organization’s purpose was to revitalize connections between churches and synagogues with groups such as the NAACP and National Urban League, and to expand upon the work that the Council Against Discrimination and the Civic Unity Council had begun twenty years earlier.

If the year 1964 witnessed a quickening in civil rights activism by a new cadre of clerical and lay activists, it also saw a growing opposition to government-imposed equal rights legislation. In San Francisco that year Mayor John F. Shelley proposed to the city Board of Supervisors a permanent Human Rights Commission. The Board established the Commission on July 13, and Shelley quickly appointed the fifteen Commissioners, including religious activists Sister Rose Maureen Kelly, B.V.M., Father Boyle, and Rabbi Alvin Fine. Outspoken critics of the new city commission disliked it for the very reason its proponents demanded its establishment: the Human Rights Commission wielded subpoena power and it soon developed a national reputation as an aggressive advocate of racial, religious, gender, and sexual orientation equality in education, employment, and housing.

The increasingly robust property-rights based libertarian opposition to racial liberal legislation was a national as well as a local phenomenon. Racial liberals by the thousands marched down Market Street on July 11 in protest against Barry Goldwater’s scheduled appearance the next day at the 1964 Republic Party convention in San Francisco. The demonstrators excoriated the Arizona senator as the "anti-civil rights candidate" because of his recent vote against the federal Civil Rights Act. But Goldwater’s supporters cheered when the senator exhorted delegates that "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." The California Real Estate Association and like-minded property owners throughout the Golden State were similarly inclined when they renamed the state’s anti-discrimination housing legislation the "forced housing" not "fair housing" acts. Their remedy for such "government tyranny" was the voter-initiated constitutional amendment designed to block government bans against discrimination in housing that would become Prop 14.

The events associated with Prop 14 began in 1959 when California passed its first fair housing laws. The Hawkins Act of that year barred discrimination in public housing; the same year, the legislature passed the Unruh Act that banned discrimination by realtors when they were acting "independent of the owner’s request." Four years later, Assemblyman Rumford introduced AB 1240 in April, 1963. This proposed ordinance aimed to prohibit owners from inquiring as to the race, color, religion, national origin or ancestry of prospective buyers/tenants, and expanded existing law to include about 70 percent of the state’s housing. The "public" aspect of preceding law was to be expanded to include "publicly assisted" housing, i.e., housing financed by G.I. bill or federally assisted mortgage money. Transactions involving realtors/brokers were also to be included.

Shortly after Assemblyman Rumford introduced the legislation, the official San Francisco archdiocesan newspaper the Monitor ran an expansive article supporting the proposed legislation. Housing discrimination threatened the "social health of society" because segregation created immoral "hermetically sealed" ghettoes that interfered with a morally-acceptable future of integrated cities and suburbs. Several other states had already bested California’s record of fair housing legislation, and the claim that prejudice could not be overcome by legislation was disproved by New York data. "Laws change community patterns and changes in community patterns change attitude." The Monitor disparaged the argument that marshaled the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause in defense of presumed citizen property rights as a misguided resuscitation of a long-dead antebellum State’s Rights ideology. The Monitor’s support for racial equality in housing was followed two months later by a pastoral letter from the American Bishops entitled "On Racial Harmony." The Bishops declared unambiguously that racial segregation was a violation of Christian teaching and argued that "respect for personal rights is both a moral duty, and a civic one."

By the end of September, the California Assembly and Senate approved the Rumford Fair Housing Act, and liberal Democratic Governor Edmund G. (Pat) Brown signed it into law. Immediately, the California Real Estate Association announced plans to gather signatures for a ballot referendum leading to a constitutional amendment to nullify the new law. In November, the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice urged Californians to defend the Rumford Act, when it resolved that "No Catholic in good conscience can sign petitions or support laws or ordinances that deny minorities a full and equal opportunity to secure decent homes on a non-discriminatory basis."
San Francisco’s Archbishop McGucken signed a full page ad in the New York Times urging voters to withhold support for the repeal petition. State Controller Alan Cranston, speaking at a testimonial dinner for Byron Rumford argued that Rumford’s new law had not been found lacking; it had not been given an opportunity. Cranston agreed with the argument that we "can’t legislate morality, but we can and must uphold legislation that provides conditions conducive to morality."

At the grassroots, conservative voters avidly signed the petitions, and by February 25, 1964, enough signatures, half of them from Los Angeles County, were confirmed to put the measure on the ballot. Governor Brown, a San Franciscan and a practicing Catholic, tried to derail the future success of the measure by convincing lawmakers to place it on the fall, rather than the spring, ballot. Brown imagined (wrongly, as it turned out) that the larger liberal turnout expected in the November presidential election would condemn the measure to defeat. Like the San Francisco Catholic Interracial Council, Brown realized the potential significance of repeal of the Rumford Act. If California approved a constitutional amendment barring further local or state legislation on behalf of housing rights regardless of race, color, religion, ancestry, or national origin, the forces of conservative reaction would win a substantial national victory.

Most of the Catholic bishops of California went on record in opposition to Prop 14, but Cardinal McIntyre of Los Angeles refused to condemn the measure, declaring that "the Roman Catholic Church doesn’t take a stand on political matters." He advised Catholics to vote their conscience, as "the teaching of the Church is clear." According to Monsignor Francis A. Quinn, who edited the Monitor during the Prop 14 campaign, Archbishop McGucken respected "the tradition that clergy did not take the forefront in these matters" [the Prop 14 fight] at the same time that he believed it was "right for the Church to be involved but with prudence and moderation." McGucken therefore declined invitations to appear in person and declare his position forthrightly and instead designated or allowed those who would speak uncompromisingly against Prop 14 to represent the Church.

When McGucken did act, or speak, he avoided outright attacks on the supporters of Prop 14 while arguing that the measure deserved repudiation. He insisted that newspaper ads asking voters not to sign the petition to get the measure on the ballot avoid all "accusation" of the real estate industry. At the same time, he insisted on strengthening the language of the ads so as to make explicit that "The initiative now proposed would not only kill existing California law, but would prohibit legislative, and other agencies of state and local government, including the courts, from dealing with acts of religious or social discrimination in housing." The changes were made; the full page ad ran in the New York Times the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle on December 23, 1963.
The Archbishop hoped the Proposition would be declared unconstitutional by the courts and removed from the ballot, thereby relieving him of the need to make a public condemnation of the measure, but in the meantime he cautiously provided support for the anti Prop 14 from behind the scenes. When Rabbi Joseph Glaser of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations threatened that "Protestants and Jews will go it alone" if McGucken would not personally participate in interfaith efforts to stop the repeal of the Rumford Act, the Archbishop delegated Father Boyle as the Archdiocesan representative. Glaser was no doubt unaware that the Archbishop would send a check drawn on archdiocesan funds, for twice the amount requested, to his coreligionist Benjamin Swig, the director of Californians against Proposition 14 group.

McGucken was invited to give the invocation when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. appeared at an anti-l4 rally at the Cow Palace on May 26, 1964. Following past practice, he declined, once again sending Father Boyle in his place. Boyle condemned Prop 14 as representing "an alien, un-American and unchristian concept of property which must be rejected." In late May, the Archbishop himself was quoted as saying that Catholics who supported the Prop 14 made "errors in conscience" (in which a person can perform an objectively immoral act while remaining subjectively free of guilt because his conscience is sincere and free of immoral intent). He was personally opposed to repeal, but he would not go so far as to say that Catholics had a moral duty to vote against it. Edward Keating, publisher of the local leftwing magazine Ramparts publicly criticized the Archbishop, calling him "derelict in his duties" for opposing the measure on constitutional, rather than on moral grounds.
The Archbishop’s hope that the courts would remove Prop 14 from the ballot was disappointed. By September, the measure still had not been taken off the ballot and McGucken established the Archdiocesan Social Justice Commission to promote and coordinate racial justice education in connection with the anti-Prop 14 campaign. Leadership fell to Father Boyle, John Delury, Monsignor Francis Quinn, editor of the Monitor, and Monsignor Bernard Cummins, superintendent of archdiocesan schools, with one pastor representative from each county in the diocese. The Archbishop asked all pastors to form committees of six to ten members to discuss issues of social justice in their parishes, and recommended that each pastor preach twice on racial justice before the election. According to a partial follow-up survey, 32 parishes had several sermons on the topic; nine had one; and six had none.

Two weeks before the election, on October 22, 1964, McGucken published a "Letter on Christian Justice and Love" on the front page of the Monitor. Sent from Rome, where he was attending a session of Vatican II, the letter did not mention the Proposition directly, but it stated plainly that "inequality in opportunity to enjoy housing because of race is an insult to human dignity." The Archbishop ordered that the letter be read from every pulpit in the Archdiocese. The Chancery office did not object when the city’s largest circulation daily newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that the "Pastoral letter from Rome urges 750,000 Catholics in the Archdiocese to vote ‘no’ on 14."
Archbishop McGucken did not provide public leadership in the campaign against Prop 14, and he did not speak out directly in official capacity until two weeks before the election, but he made no attempt to restrain or moderate the editorial content or the reportage on the controversy over fair housing by the official diocesan newspaper. In September 1963, the Monitor published a non-discriminatory statement on its real estate page; it continued to appear, and was praised in the "Letters" column, on a regular basis. Lengthy articles appeared on the issue of race. Many did not address the Rumford Act or repeal efforts directly, but they nonetheless promulgated the Church’s anti-racist teaching. In a full page article, Hastings College of the Law professor Richard R.B. Powell wrote, "Property rights cease when civil rights involving the public interest is at stake." Father Joseph Farraher, S.J., contributed four articles that appeared in September and October elaborating the thesis that "it is a sin against charity and justice to refuse to sell a house on the basis of race." Farraher insisted that since the Rumford Act was fully in accord with Church teaching "Catholic moral teaching requires a ‘no’ vote." As the length and quantity of these articles increased, one reader was prompted to complain; he counted eleven articles related to race, civil rights, or the Rumford Act, in the August 27, 1964 issue "each giving a one-sided [anti Prop 14] view."

The Monitor endorsed the Rumford Act after its passage and called for a "No" vote on Prop 14. Commenting on the divisions among San Francisco Catholics, the editor acknowledged "tension between members of the Church" but also insisted that the "law which went into effect on September 20 is a moderate one; give it a chance." The December 27 editorial cartoon revised the story of the Magi; instead of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, the Three Kings brought the infant Jesus racial justice, a ban on nuclear testing, and a successful outcome for the second session of the Ecumenical Council. In January, the editor challenged conservative readers who quarreled with Catholic civil rights activism by asking "What is the Church’s function if not to make its voice known on moral issues?"

By late August, 1964, with Barry Goldwater campaigning for president and the Prop 14 campaign in high gear, the Monitor editorialized that "no California voter should vote ‘yes’ on 14," citing the authority of Bishop Floyd L. Begin of Oakland that "Prop. 14 contradicts what is clear and universal Catholic social teaching." In his October 10 column, Monsignor Bernard Cummins, Superintendent of Archdiocesan Schools addressed "the uneasiness of many in the Church in dealing with social issues" pointing out that "the Church is a newcomer to the area." Cummins traced the development of the Church’s stand on public issues from Leo XIII’s encyclicals to John XXIII’S "continued emphasis on the role of the Church in the World." When Catholics found themselves uncertain about "the relationship of the Church to the world, i.e. politics" they should listen for guidance: "The Bishops will speak." Archbishop McGucken spoke out strongly against Prop 14 in his pastoral letter of October 22, and the accompanying editorial instructed readers that although the measure "has split the state and has also created differences within the Church" the Archbishop spoke for the Church and "The Church does not use authority recklessly."

Several members of the local Catholic Interracial Council criticized the Archbishop for his cautious strategy and tactics during the campaign. They faulted the Archdiocese for failing to take a more active stand in the community at large and called for an all-out campaign to defend fair housing. These critics wanted the Archdiocese to make public common cause with anti Prop 14 efforts of the Jewish Community Relations Council and the San Francisco Council of Churches. CIC officer Mac Hull of San Rafael envisioned a door-to-door campaign "reaching every Catholic household in California." "The character of the Civil Rights movement could proceed to success if full religious witness can be brought to bear on those who say they believe, but are prejudiced." CIC members who distributed anti Prop 14 literature after Sunday Mass sometimes found themselves criticized for being too aggressive by parishioners who complained to Archbishop McGucken. John Riordan, another CIC activist addressed the issue of how to proselytize among his coreligionists when he argued that the group needed to find "positive ways" to spread "Church teaching on race."
Catholics who objected to sermons against Prop 14 and the distribution of anti-Prop 14 literature after Mass gave tacit approval to the point of view announced by Robert Miller, head of the Northern California Committee for "Yes on 14." Miller insisted that the issue was political, not religious, and discussion of its merits did not belong in the pulpit. In Los Gatos, a Santa Clara County town 60 miles south of San Francisco, Catholics claiming to represent 60 parishes organized a "Yes on 14" group, but such organized support for the measure did not exist in San Francisco. Shortly after the Rumford Act took effect, the St. Thomas More Society’s Catholic attorneys established their own Lawyers’ Committee on Interracial Justice. The San Francisco Archdiocesan Council of Catholic Men called for the defeat of Prop 14 at their convention at Riordan High School, and the Archdiocesan Council of Catholic Women, in "only the second time this group has taken a public stand on an issue," also came out against Prop 14. The chairman of the USF Theology Department at USF bluntly informed Catholics that if they voted in favor of Prop 14, they were putting their salvation at risk.

On November 3, 1964 California voters passed Prop 14 by a two-to-one majority. In San Francisco, the measure passed, but by a much narrower margin: 150,314 "yes" votes; 134,611 "no" votes. Only two counties, Humboldt and Inyo rejected 14, as did the city of Palo Alto. Governor Brown declared that he would not enforce the law until its constitutionality was verified and the California Secretary of State refused to certify the vote. The Federal Government threatened to hold further federal funds for slum clearance in view of the victory of Prop 14. John Delury of the CIC and the Social Justice Commission and Earl Raab of the San Francisco Human Relations Clearing House immediately set to work in support of the ultimately successful legal campaign to overturn the voter mandate in the courts. Eventually the California State Supreme Court declared 14 unconstitutional, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the ruling.
Assessments of the Catholic participation in the No on Prop 14 fight, and the Catholic role in civil rights work more generally began even before the November election. In a January 31, 1964 Op Ed, Father James Gaffey criticized the Church hierarchy because they had "preached, but not lead" in the racial justice campaign. When the Monitor polled local Catholics on October 22, 55 percent replied that Church conduct in racial matters was "weak," 20 percent "too strong," and 25 percent "just right," and 18 percent of respondents believed that civil rights and race relations was an "improper subject" for the Church. When asked to predict the outcome of the Prop 14 vote, 51 percent predicted a "no" vote, while the remaining 49 percent felt the proposition would pass.126 The poll showed that 61 percent of respondents felt that race relations had improved since the beginning of the decade, and fully 89 percent believed that the highly publicized spring 1964 sit-ins at the Sheraton Palace Hotel had "not helped" the cause of racial justice. Judging from this admittedly impressionistic survey and from sentiment expressed in the "Letters to the Editor" column of the Monitor, the sit-ins seem to have been a pivotal event in influencing positions. Before the sit-ins letter writers often described themselves as conscience-stricken over racial justice issues; afterwards, many described themselves as repelled by "lawlessness."

Retrospective analyses of the Catholic role in civil rights work also noted the gap between the liberal clerical and lay racial justice activists who spoke out in favor of fair employment and fair housing laws and the conservative grassroots parishioners who opposed them. Father George Kennard, S.J., who had preached at numerous Bay Area churches on the Bishop’s 1958 Pastoral Letter, believed that the effort to defeat Prop 14 was lost at the parish 1evel, because priests and pastors alike refused to forthrightly speak out for civil rights for fear of offending conservative members of their parish. According to Kennard, San Francisco churches in the Haight Ashbury and Western Addition neighborhoods, more racially mixed than other areas, were most active, but in the upper middle class Richmond District pastors and their congregations were apathetic and perhaps even hostile to racial reform laws. In such parishes, according to Kennard, a "curtain of silence" descended and the Church’s stand against racial injustice was not actively promoted. Father Boyle and John Delury, leaders in both the CIC and the Social Justice Commission looked back on their efforts as an instance of doing too little, too late. Boyle praised the energy and commitment of his racial justice activist colleagues, especially the Catholic nuns who spread the gospel of equality in parish schools, but his overall assessment was negative. The activists "had minimal influence on the Catholic population generally;" they "failed to make members understand the facts of discrimination;" Church teaching on racial justice remained "relegated to library shelves." Delury, reflecting on the fact that a mere 1.4 percent of the local Catholic population were African American, and that San Francisco’s white Catholics consequently tended to minimize the seriousness of racism in their midst, ruefully concluded that racial justice activism may have reached only a "dedicated fringe." Historian Clay O’Dell concludes his study of the CIC effort with a mixed verdict that mirrors the split among the twenty-six veteran activists he surveyed: "those advocating greater action and more controversial tactics tending to see the group as less successful than those who tended towards pointing out the value in ‘raising awareness.’" Mary Anne Colwell was one of the former activists in the San Francisco CIC who participated in O’Dell’s survey. Like Father Boyle, Colwell stressed the role of women in the racial justice movement; in her estimation they "did at least half and probably more of the organizational work" in the CIC. "There were plenty of people who did not support the work of the CIC and a few hostile priests – but in the whole [sic] most people recognized our work as necessary. I would say most laity and clergy were passively supportive."

The downbeat assessments of Kennard, Boyle and Delury have been echoed in recent critical commentary on Catholics and the civil rights movement at the grassroots during the 1950 and 1960s. According to this interpretation, a negative rather than a positive assessment must be levied given the dispiriting chasm between high hopes and modest accomplishments. White Catholics generally are faulted for having failed to embrace the racial justice movement wholeheartedly, and this alleged fact is presented as part of the evidence that disproves a central thesis in a celebratory narrative about the golden age of Great Society liberalism. However, historians have never claimed that liberalism triumphed, that the civil rights movement was an unalloyed success, or that Catholics were a homogeneous collectivity that backed the racial justice movements unanimously. The successes of the civil rights movements from the 40s through the 60s were indeed partial, and the extent of Catholic participation should not be exaggerated. All the same, the moderate goals and measured successes of the San Francisco racial justice advocates should be acknowledged and respected for they were: a sincere attempt on the part of Catholics who acted on their faith and took public action in pursuit of a more just society. This seems especially important in the long term perspective of nearly a half century, given the persistence of racist bigotry, prejudice, and discrimination across the globe.