{"id":1781,"date":"2009-02-03T05:46:00","date_gmt":"2009-02-03T05:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/mcnamarasblog\/2009\/02\/%e2%80%9cracism-is-a-god-damned-thing%e2%80%9d\/"},"modified":"2009-02-03T05:46:00","modified_gmt":"2009-02-03T05:46:00","slug":"%e2%80%9cracism-is-a-god-damned-thing%e2%80%9d","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/mcnamarasblog\/2009\/02\/%e2%80%9cracism-is-a-god-damned-thing%e2%80%9d.html","title":{"rendered":"\u201cRacism is a God Damned Thing\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

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He looked like a movie star, and John Markoe\u2019s life<\/a> would make a pretty good movie. Born to a blue-blood Philadelphia family in 1890, he left home after high school to work on the railroad out west. He came back when he was appointed to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He played in the 1913 Army-Notre Dame game that saw Knute Rockne\u2019s forward pass. He graduated with the Class of 1915, known as \u201cthe class the stars fell on.\u201d (Fifty-nine of the 164 graduates became generals, including Markoe\u2019s lifelong friends Dwight D. Eisenhower and Omar N. Bradley.) After graduation, he was posted to a Black cavalry regiment on the Mexican border, but heavy drinking cost him his commission. He then went to Minnesota where he worked as a lumberjack and joined the National Guard. During the undeclared war with Pancho Villa in 1916, he won back his commission, but by then he had sight on different goals. In 1917 John Markoe joined the Missouri Province of the Jesuits, a step his brother Bill had taken a few years earlier. Not long thereafter the Markoe brothers took a pledge to \u201cgive our whole lives and energies to the salvation of the Negro in the United States.\u201d His attempts to integrate St. Louis University during the forties earned him the enmity of local church authorities, and he was \u201cexiled\u201d to Creighton University in Nebraska, where he taught math. Creighton was a city with a growing African-American population, and segregation was in full swing. Markoe played a leading role in forming the DePorres Club<\/a> at the university, \u201cto educate people to think along the lines of charity and justice as regards inter-racial matters.\u201d One Creighton alumnus said of Markoe: \u201cHis utter conviction that civil rights was what we should be doing kept us going.\u201d The Jesuit often said: \u201cRacism is a God Damned thing. And that\u2019s two words: God Damned<\/em>.\u201d From the 1940\u2019s on, the club was organizing sit-ins and boycotting railway companies, organized protest marches. They even forced the city\u2019s Coca-Cola plant to accept Black applicants. Not long before Markoe\u2019s death in 1967, John Howard Griffin<\/a>, author of Black Like Me<\/em><\/a>, said that the Jesuit was \u201cin the cauldron when most of us were in diapers.\u201d<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

He looked like a movie star, and John Markoe\u2019s life would make a pretty good movie. Born to a blue-blood Philadelphia family in 1890, he left home after high school to work on the railroad out west. He came back when he was appointed to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He played in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1042,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n\u201cRacism is a God Damned Thing\u201d<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"He looked like a movie star, and John Markoe\u2019s life would make a pretty good movie. 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