Talk:DePorres Club

My Aunt Rita's experience in Omaha, circa 1947-48

When I was an undergraduate at Harvard in the early 1980s, I took a class in post-WW2 history taught by the renown historian, Alan Brinkley (1949-2019). In a lecture about the roots of the 20th-century civil-rights movement, he devoted a significant part of a lecture on its mid-century manifestation to describe an incident that occurred in Omaha, Nebraska around 1946-47.

As I recall Brinkley’s narrative of over 40 years ago, a Jesuit priest who lectured at Creighton University, Rev. John Markoe, was teaching a class in social justice when he brought his college students on a weekend tour of less-affluent neighborhoods in Omaha. As is typical in the Jesuit tradition, his students included folks from diverse backgrounds. But when they entered a lunch counter for a bite to eat, the proprietor refused to serve them because several of the students were Black.

At the time, the non-violent protests of Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) were much in the news; this was contemporaneous with the newly won independence of India after the dissolution of the British Raj — and the subsequent (and unfortunately sanguinary) Partition of India.

Thus it seems Rev. Markoe was well aware of the power of non-violent protest — and when his students were collectively refused service, he launched his initial endeavors with lunch-counter sit-ins by groups of students of mixed complexions.

When I related Brinkley’s story to my late mother, an Omaha native — she told me that her sister, my Aunt Rita, was an undergraduate who was studying sociology at Creighton at the time, and she thought Rita had participated in those early lunch-counter sit-ins.

My aunt is now 97-years of age, and I asked her yesterday if she recalled those events, which she had described to several of my cousins in years past. Alas, Rita’s memory has been failing in recent years and I live 1200 miles away from her current residence. I’ve not yet elicited any first-hand account from Rita thus far — but I will keep trying… --Theophilus Reed (talk) 03:35, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

CORE

The Congress of Racial Equality page describes the DePorres Club as an affiliate of CORE, but there's no mention of that here. Rojomoke (talk) 09:36, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

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