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Rudd’s dream inspired by 'equality before the altar'

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By Tom Stafford, Staff Writer 4:20 PM Saturday, February 4, 2012

Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t the only man who dreamed of equality.

In the Springfield of 1886, one-time Kentucky slave and by then printer and editor Daniel Rudd dreamed of rallying people to the cause by tapping into the same moral power King would use in the next century.

As Gary B. Agee recounts in “A Cry for Justice ($39.95, University of Arkansas Press),” Rudd’s upbringing in the Catholic faith and his belief in its principle of “equality before the altar” led him to become “more and more convinced of the central role the Catholic church would necessarily play in ushering in a ‘new civilization,’ a more humane society characterized by full equality for all races.”

As Rudd envisioned it, the movement “would not only elevate black Americans,” writes Agee, who did his doctoral dissertation at University of Datyon, “but also teach members of white society more generally the truth concerning the fundamental unity of the human family.”

Subtitled “Daniel Rudd and His Life in Black Catholicism, Journalism and Activism, 1854-1933,” the book offers no strong evidence of Rudd’s status as a dreamer than in its opening quote.

Said Rudd on Feb. 10, 1888: “We think we will live long enough to see a black man president of the Republic.”

 Early faith

Rudd was born into both slavery and the Catholic faith in 1854 on the Haydon Plantation near Bardstown, Ky., where his parents served as sextons at St. Joseph Proto-Catholic Church.

He wrote that he was baptized “at the same font where all the rest, white and black were baptized, without discrimination except as who got there first.”

At confirmation, he added, he “knelt beside as fair a (white) damsel as ever bowed before the rail and thought nothing of it.”

Whether Rudd came to Springfield with an older brother in 1865 or in the early 1880s isn’t clear from the historical records, writes Agee, an adjunct professor of church history at Indiana’s Anderson University.

But Rudd appears to have finished his education at Springfield High School; worked for Gustavus Foos, boarded at the city’s European Hotel; and called Springfield’s “Reaper King” William Whitely “the first great manufacturer in the United States to give the colored mechanic a full fair showing.”

While in Springfield, Rudd attended St. Raphael Catholic Church and befriended its priest, Fr. William Sidley.

Civic activism

A printer and publisher in his Springfield years, Agee writes, “Rudd, like (Frederick) Douglass, demonstrated a commitment to a direct editorial campaign for full equality, a more confrontational approach that included a commitment to political and judicial activism.”

“In September, 1881,” Agee says, “Rudd ... joined other African American leaders to protest the local school board’s discriminatory policy.”

But in 1886, Rudd decided to use his experience and skills as a writer and printer to start his American Catholic Tribune in Springfield, seeing it as a vehicle in which his faith could be married to his activism.

Agee reports this came after Rudd “became disillusioned with the political process and the Republican Party particularly” as the party retreated from its once forceful support of black rights.

“Just when the impulse of American politicians thought it a good time to throw the stalwart youth (freed slaves) overboard,” Rudd wrote, “there steps in a force that is more potent than impulsive political parties and as steady as gravitation, and calls a halt.”

That force was the church, whose call to equality Rudd expressed with the words: “The Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man.”

To Cincinnati

Rudd and his co-publisher, Theodore Whitson, moved the American Catholic Telegram to Cincinnati in 1886, perhaps because of the support of Archbishop William Henry Elder, and perhaps to tap into the larger Catholic community there.

To promote his four-page weekly paper, Rudd sent five salesmen into the field to get subscriptions and augmented the paper’s profits with a custom printing business run out of the same office.

As the circulation of the ACT grew to 10,000, Rudd’s influence grew, as did his faith that the Catholic Church would do what the larger society would not.

Agee says Rudd was encouraged by the church’s work to end the international slave trade and the outspoken voice of Archbishop of St. Paul, Minn., John Ireland.

When Ireland railed that it was “a stain on the country’s history that there were ever men beneath our flag who we refused to treat as our equals,” Rudd wrote: “If the colored press of the United Sates mean to be fair to the race and the cause of equality, the sermon ... will be reproduced in every Negro paper in the United States.”

Not all voices were so progressive.

John Mackey, associate editor of Rudd’s paper and a pastor at the Cathedral of Peter in Chains in Cincinnati, opposed the “social equality” movement of the time, arguing that “the individual of either race who disregards this line of demarcation (in skin color) drawn apparently by nature herself, is no credit to either race.”

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