This One’s For You, Joe & Jane

My father and mother were the blackest white people whom I have ever known. What I mean by that is that not only were some of their best friends Negroes, to use the painfully archaic cliche of their day, they talked the talk and they walked the walk as civil-rights activists. But despite being optimistic about most things they were unable to imagine the day that a black person could become president of the United States.

Joe and Jane Mullen were never denied a hotel room or turned away at a lunch counter, but both had been the victims of prejudice and that made their commitment to social justice and deep feelings for the disenfranchised all the more real.

My father’s parents were immigrants. He grew up in grinding poverty and was taunted for his ratty clothes, Irish lineage and Catholicism.

My mother’s father was a German Jew who arrived in America with 12 cents in his pocket and her mother an Anglican from an old Philadelphia family.

She felt the prejudice that her father experienced, and in a coup de grâce administered by a Catholic Church steeped in its own special brand of prejudice, she and my father had to be married in a sub assistant priest’s vestry office and not a church because . . . well, you know, that Jewish problem.

I will never forget my father, by then very much a lapsed Catholic, telling me after returning home from Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Had a Dream” speech in Washington, that he had felt a kinship and spirituality that day unlike anything he had ever felt in church.

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