Chapter Four: Civic Engagement

Chapter Four of “Gus and Julia Bowe, Remembered”

As told by William J. Bowe, drawn from his January 29, 2021 interview with his cousin Tony Bowe.

Table of Contents

Religious Views and Engagement

Civic Engagement

Summary

This chapter looks at the Bowe families’ faith and civic life, from their Catholic upbringing and Gus’s long chairmanship of Loyola University’s Citizens’ Board, to the family’s sustained, decades-long engagement in efforts to improve race relations in Chicago — work that led Mayor Edward Kelly, and later Mayor Richard J. Daley, to put Gus at the head of the city’s commission on race relations.

The Narrative

Religious Views and Engagement

I couldn’t say for certain how religious Gus and Julia were in any deep sense, in a way later generations wouldn’t fully understand about that world. Vocations ran through Irish Catholic families of that era, boys and girls alike, not infrequently into the priesthood or the convent. My mother had female relatives in convents she’d known growing up in Baltimore. Gus and Julia and my own parents were church-going Catholics. They not infrequently entertained a priest at dinner, often a Maryknoll back from some mission abroad in China or South America eager to talk about it. I’d say they were believers. Gus was chairman of Loyola University’s Citizens’ Board for something like a decade and a half. I remember asking him once about his Jesuit education at St. Ignatius, and he said, with a smile, something like: “The Jesuits, they’re pretty smart. They figured out I was a good candidate for the priesthood. They took a run at it, but I escaped.”

Civic Engagement

Both Bowe families, Gus and Julia, my father and mother, were all engaged from the 1930s on in efforts to improve race relations and the lot of the city’s Black population. I think that came at least partly out of the moral education embedded in their Catholic upbringing, and partly it also grew out of their own experience growing up Irish, when that wasn’t always an easy path in America either. The law firms of the era tended to divide along ethnic lines, Jewish firms, Catholic firms, and before that, largely white Protestant firms. They had seen that kind of exclusion themselves. What set them apart from many others who might have shared those instincts is that they actually acted on them. Both Gus and my father were active from the 1930s on in the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Housing in that period was thoroughly segregated, enforced by restrictive covenants in real estate deeds that the Supreme Court didn’t strike down until the late 1940s, and job discrimination was worse still. In their law practice, they were close to working people and what they were up against.

Race relations had already been fraught with violence in Chicago after the First World War, with terrible riots in 1919, and during World War II a serious riot broke out in Detroit in 1943. Chicago’s Mayor Edward Kelly, worried the city could see the same kind of disorder, set up a city commission on race relations, forward-thinking of him, and asked Gus to head it. Gus, already known for his earlier work in the area, said yes. When Kelly was succeeded by Mayor Martin Kennelly in 1947, Gus carried on under him. Gus told me he had gone to Richard J. Daley, after Daley beat Kennelly in the 1955 Democratic primary, to offer his resignation, since he’d backed Kennelly. Daley wouldn’t hear of it; that was no reason to step down. Under Daley, the commission, later the Commission on Human Relations, got a paid staff, an executive director, and a broader board for the first time, and Gus remained its chairman through the 1950s, until his election as Chief Justice of the Municipal Court in 1960. He was also one of the founders of the Catholic Interracial Council, which, alongside John McDermott’s leadership, worked to push the Church itself further and faster on civil rights than it was otherwise moving in the 1950s.

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