How Brother Terence McLaughlin Helped Transform Memphis

By some cosmic sweep of coincidence, Brother Terence McLaughlin has spent more time in Memphis than at any other Christian Brothers’ outpost in the world. And in early 1960s Memphis, his no-nonsense manner and good judgment quietly and utterly changed the lives of first one boy, and then a trickle that grew to a stream.

The boy was Jesse Turner Jr., who grew up to earn his undergraduate degree and MBA from the University of Chicago and returned home to one day be named president of the long storied Tri-State Bank, later acting on the national stage as a member of the NAACP’s board of directors.

But in the summer of 1963, Turner was an average 13-year-old from the south side of Memphis. He had just finished eighth grade at St. Augustine’s Catholic School, one of a handful of Catholic elementary schools for black children in Memphis. The logical path, pursued by hundreds before and after him, was to begin his freshman year at Father Bertrand High School at 1169 Kerr, a few blocks from the Turners’ home at South Parkway and Bellevue.

If young Jesse Turner was a regular kid, his parents, Jesse Sr. and Allegra, were decidedly irregular. The fall before, they had taken the audacious step of trying to get their oldest son admitted to Christian Brothers High School, the all-white Catholic high school the Brothers established here in 1871.

Brother McLaughlin, a first-time college/high school administrator, accepted the application, not because he was a liberal from the North bent on changing the South, but because he saw no reason why an earnest, hard-working boy of any color should not have the right to go to a Brothers’ school.

“I was sympathetic because it was the right thing to do, as the president of the college-high school complex. And here was a good student who wanted to come,” Brother Terence explains, remembering the turmoil he deliberately unleashed more than 55 years ago.

At 95, Terence McLaughlin is the oldest living Christian Brother in a stretch of Catholicism from New Orleans to Minneapolis. He’s straight as a pole, more than 6 feet tall, inclined to drab colors, but still takes satisfaction in his work. He lives with 10 other Brothers in a commune of sorts on the Christian Brothers University campus. Each of them has a single bed, dresser, chair and desk, in a series of individual rooms so close to the busy railroad tracks on Avery that their nights, in truth, are a series of three or four quiet intervals.

“The Brothers’ mission is to educate the poor.” — Brother Terence

Every day of the year, the Brothers rise at 6 a.m. for morning prayer and breakfast. And then, as McLaughlin has done for the 78 years he’s been a Christian Brother, he goes to work.

For more than 55 years, he started, taught, and led various Christian Brothers’ schools in the Midwest — first their high schools, then their colleges. In 2000, he retired at 78 and was sent by the Lasallian Order to live out his retirement at Lambert Hall on the CBU campus. He’s now been back in Memphis for 18 years.

The restored statue of St. Jean-Baptiste de la Salle, in front of the Brothers’ home, is an example of his ingenuity in retirement. Until it was crushed by falling trees in Hurricane Elvis, the statue oversaw the comings and goings on campus. McLaughlin, known affectionately among his fellow Brothers as the “dean,” had the pieces hauled to the garage while he looked for someone in town who could put the statue back together.

“That’s just an example of what he will do,” says Brother Joel McGraw, a stalwart in the leadership and faculty at Christian Brothers High School for 50 years. “That’s always been his way; he’ll do the things people won’t see. That’s what Brothers do.”

McLaughlin smiles at that, then shakes his head in feigned contempt with McGraw who, at 73, is one of the youngsters in the order here. Even with its two new young recruits, the average age now easily approaches 80.

“You gotta watch Joel,” he says.

When he dies, McLaughlin will be buried at Calvary Cemetery, in a plot the Brothers own, surrounded by Irish Travelers, and at least a thousand miles from his closest relative.

If anything makes McLaughlin sad, it’s that the brotherhood of men that numbered at least 400 in the Midwest District in his day has dwindled to about 130. He’s also quietly devastated that the eight Jubilee Schools, the network of inner-city Catholic schools that reopened in Memphis just as McLaughlin was retiring, are slated to close for good when this school year ends. There are plans to reopen them as charter schools, but McLaughlin knows public schools can never teach Catholic theology or ethics, and he wonders what will come of the mostly poor black and Hispanic children the schools have served for the last 18 years.

“The Brothers’ mission is to educate the poor,” Brother Terence says, shaking his head. “We’ve also relied on those schools to provide diversity at the [Christian Brothers] high school.”

In 1963, Christian Brothers High was a school for white boys. Today, about 10 percent of its 900 students are African American. Like other private schools in Memphis, it would have naturally integrated on its own without the Turners. With them, integration happened a full 10 years before Plan Z, approved by Judge Robert McRae, set in place the forced busing of 40,000 Memphis City Schools children.

“Racial discrimination is un-American. You don’t need a revolution. You just need to get people to follow the laws that are here.”— Jesse Turner Sr.

McLaughlin remembers fondly the grace and courage of Allegra Turner, a communicant at St. Augustine Catholic Church. So intent on getting a good education for her children in the segregated South, in 1961 she single-handedly picketed Immaculate Conception, pushing a baby in a carriage back and forth in front of the elementary school with another child in her arms, when it refused to admit Jesse’s younger brother, Eric.

“The hero of this story is Mrs. Turner,” McLaughlin says. “She’s a modern-day saint.”

After Jesse Jr. was admitted to the high school, the Turners’ other two sons followed. Ray was the first to integrate the school’s football team, (although older brother Jesse is quick to say he quit when he was not allowed to play) and Eric, the youngest boy, was the first African American elected student body president in the East Memphis private school.

It’s hard to describe how restlessly Allegra and her husband waited after the 1954 Brown v. the Topeka Board of Education decision for Memphis to comply. For every year that passed, at least one of their five children was attending a substandard school.

“I had never spoken about integration up North. There wasn’t a question, really,” says Brother Terence, who taught school in the Midwest before he was sent to Memphis. “Down here, it was different,” he says.

McLaughlin arrived for his first of three Memphis stints in 1949. He stayed a few years, teaching ethics, mechanical drawing, American history, and serving as athletic director and freshmen basketball coach before he was reassigned to another school in the North. In 1962, he was sent back to Memphis. That fall, the National Guard massed in the city for the march to Oxford, Mississippi, and the standoff at the University of Mississippi.

“Into this, Mama applies for acceptance at CBHS, and Brother Terence says ‘Yes,’” says Jesse Turner, now 68. “We think, ‘He doesn’t probably understand what he is doing.’ If you move into an area, you usually don’t make waves.

“There were no hoops to jump through. ‘Yes, you have to take the entrance exam and show you went to grade school,’ he told us. In other words, you have to do what everyone else does. But there is no one standing in the schoolhouse door saying, ‘There will never be a black person at Christian Brothers.’”

The Turners could not believe how profoundly their fortunes had changed.

“My father’s thinking was: ‘We believe in America. And you who are white Americans, do what you say you believe. Don’t talk about it and not follow through. Racial discrimination is un-American. You don’t need a revolution. You just need to get people to follow the laws that are here.’”

“At last someone comes up and, not being forced, pushed, or sued, says, ‘OK.’ I think my father was so proud of Brother Terence. He has to have great credit for doing what he did.”

But the fight wasn’t over yet.

Brother Terence was born John Patrick McLaughlin in 1922, to Catholic immigrants from Ireland and Scotland trying to make a living in the windswept and frigid port of Duluth, Minnesota.

His father was a construction foreman; his mother, a homemaker. They sent their son to Catholic schools. Young McLaughlin was so impressed by the Brothers who ran his high school at the height of the Depression that by the middle of his sophomore year, he was ready to join them.

“I admired the life of the Brothers. I think I told my parents I would like to join them. I got great encouragement from my mother. Irish mothers were strong influencers of their sons entering religious life,” he says with a chuckle.

He left Duluth on the train, headed to Glencoe, Missouri, in the foothills of the Ozarks. Glencoe had been the spiritual home of the Lasallian Christian Brothers since 1886. All young men who wanted to pursue a life in the order started out there in dorms marked with long rows of single beds, each accompanied by a chair and foot locker. Every boy had a hook for his clothes and later, his Brother’s habit.

McLaughlin and the rest of the 101 recruits emptied out their pockets. “It was understood that you turned your money in because really, there was no place to spend it,” McLaughlin says.

The Brothers take a vow of celibacy and poverty. Brother Terence doesn’t like the word poverty and wishes the vows would be rewritten to better reflect the reality of their lives, noting that he and several others have televisions in their rooms.

“Poverty isn’t the right word,” he explains. “Community is a better word because we share what we have with each other. We give of ourselves and what we own. That forms the brotherhood.”

But he’s the first to say that living every day, celebrating every holiday, and sharing possessions with a group — of now elderly men — is one of the hardest parts of the discipline. “That’s why we speak so much about what we do! We bring back ideas from the people we meet. We invite instructors in for lunch with us.

“We need this. We have to keep alive and know what the young people are thinking. But we also have to keep our professional life together. Maybe in the early days of the religious orders, they kept to themselves. It can’t be that way now.”

He wonders occasionally what his life would have been like if he hadn’t joined the Christian Brothers. “Truthfully, I think I would have died in the front lines,” he reflects. “We had a guy in the novitiate [first] year whom I’d known since we were in elementary school. He left us the summer of 1940; he thought the brotherhood was not for him. At that time, we didn’t talk among ourselves about why someone left. We figured he didn’t have a vocation and would do something else.”

The man was drafted and died in the European theater.

“Really, being a Brother gave me opportunities in education and religious life that I do not think I otherwise would have had. It really put me on track to carry out the mission of the Brothers,” McLaughlin says.

And it was good for the Brothers, Brother Joel McGraw says. “Nothing has failed under Terence’s leadership. He’s respected as the dean. No one dislikes Terence. He’s a good community Brother, and a good school man. He has a religious dimension, and he’s plain as an old shoe.”

It’s difficult to understand what the possibility of a fine education for their children meant to Jesse and Allegra Turner without knowing their own struggle for education.

Both earned graduate degrees at the University of Chicago in the 1940s while Jim Crow segregation lay like a smog across the South. Jesse was six months short of finishing his undergrad degree at LeMoyne College when he was drafted in 1941.

“He appealed the draft decision,” says Turner Jr., who recounts the details of the family’s stories with deliberate order. “The Army assigned him to Memphis to finish his education.

“There are these moments where not everyone acts the way you expect them to act,” he says quietly and then smiles. “That allowed him to get his degree.”

Allegra did well in elementary school, but black children in New Roads, Louisiana, did not go to high school. Her parents found a way.

“She went to Baton Rouge, 30 miles away, as a ninth-grader and lived and worked in an orphanage,” Turner explains. “The family feared reprisals if folks learned she was going away to school. People were told she was working and not getting an education.”

When she graduated, Allegra enrolled at Southern University, the historically black college in Baton Rouge. After graduation, she went to work for the War Department in Washington and saved her money to go, she hoped, to the University of Chicago. She had enough for one semester when she decided to go until themoney ran out.

About that time, Turner says, a relative discovered that, in those “separate but equal” days in Louisiana, state taxpayers paid for black students to attend school elsewhere if the graduate program they wanted was at Louisiana State University.

“Louisiana paid to send her to the University of Chicago, rather than to let her go to LSU,” he says. There Allegra earned a master’s degree in human development and met Jesse Turner.

In a terse handwritten note to Brother McLaughlin dated May 22, 1963, Bishop William Adrian, head of the Diocese of Nashville, chastised the Memphis Brother for his “unfortunate” decision to “register a negro student” without consulting the head of the Catholic schools in Memphis.

The policy on mixing the races in the parochial schools in Memphis, the bishop reminded Brother Terence, then a 40-year-old first-time college administrator, was that this would happen when priests in Shelby County said it was time.

“Evidently, you misunderstood or ignored this,” Bishop Adrian wrote in a series of letters McLaughlin has saved. He made it clear that he was turning the issue over to Father John Elliott, superintendent of the Catholic schools in Memphis. “We will await his decision.”

Adrian was not unsympathetic to the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision. In Nashville, he immediately oversaw the integration of the city’s Catholic schools. But Memphis, he feared, was a totally different situation.

Brother Terence believes Bishop Adrian didn’t want controversy. “He said it would be up to the priests in Memphis to decide,” McLaughlin says, remembering the agony he felt about the issue, playing out at the same time he was trying to raise money to build the new Christian Brothers High School on Walnut Grove.

“Then the superintendent of the schools says, ‘No, it’s up to the bishop,’” McLaughlin says, shaking his head and laughing. “No one wanted to be the fall guy.”

By March of 1963, Bishop Adrian had come up with a plan to gradually and peacefully integrate the church’s Memphis schools. Starting that fall, African-American children in grades 1 through 4 would be allowed to enroll. Two years later, the schools would accept non-white children through the eighth grade. In the fall of 1966, Memphis Catholic High and Christian Brothers High School would be integrated.

Memphis priests were instructed to read the plan from the pulpit. Allegra Turner heard it and wondered what it meant for her son, Jesse, whom Brother Terence had already accepted. In the meantime, Brother Adrian was getting an earful of fretting from a cadre of Memphis priests who saw nothing but trouble if the Turner boy was allowed to enter.

“It was certainly possible that some of their parishioners would be upset, and this is what they feared,” McLaughlin says in Silent Acceptance, the book he wrote in 2012 about his experience. “It was this silent acceptance that I found so hard to take, a going along with the status quo without speaking out on Gospel values.”

Brother Terence still had hope, mainly because he knew some Memphis priests were on his side. He went to visit Allegra Turner at her home. When she saw him at the door, she quickly escorted her children out of the house.

“‘Brother,’ she said, ‘I will not permit my children to hear what you are going to tell me,’” McLaughlin recalls. “She thought I was going to tell her that Jesse would not be allowed to enroll. [But] we wanted Jesse at the school. We strategized about how to get him in. One of the ways was to involve the NAACP. I encouraged them to sue,” he explains.

Besides being president of Tri-State Bank, Jesse Turner Sr. was also president of the Memphis branch of the NAACP. In 1957, the Turners sued the Memphis Public Library when its staff refused to allow Allegra to check out a book. The Turners made it clear that they considered Brother Terence’s signed letter of acceptance a binding contract. They filed their suit against the school and Bishop Adrian.

About a week later, McLaughlin got a call from a very agitated Father Elliott, superintendent of schools. “It was as much to say, ‘You got us into this trouble. Those people said you said things you couldn’t have said,’” Brother Terence recalls, smiling as he remembers the conversation.

“I told him that I said all those things.”

Young Jesse Turner watched the back and forth as it played out in his parents’ hushed conversations. “It was out of our hands, but that summer, I decided the thing I could do was say the Rosary every day, and to add to it, I would go up in the attic to do it. Some days, it was 80, 100 degrees up there,” he says, smiling at the fervency of his prayer.

“I realized the door had been opened for me. My job was to go through it.” — Jesse Turner Jr.

When the Catholic hierarchy realized that the senior Turner was head of the local NAACP, they told McLaughlin to quietly admit the boy “with as little publicity as possible.”

“I wanted to go. At first, it was the novelty of going,” Turner Jr. says today. “I knew my parents had done their part. Brother Terence had done his part. I realized the door had been opened for me. My job was to go through it.”

McLaughlin remembers Allegra Turner coming to school on the first day and searching his face for reassurance that her boy would be safe.

“Brother, do I have to stay or may I go home?” she said.

“This is not a young kid coming to school for the first time,” McLaughlin says when he tells the story now, nearly six decades later. “I said to her , ‘Don’t worry. There will be no trouble.’”

Brother Terence, for reasons he will never know, was transferred to Chicago at the end of the 1962-63 school year. It’s possible, he says, the bishop thought he needed to be taught a lesson.

But in his optimism, McLaughlin says the hierarchy did him a favor by sending him to a tough assignment in Chicago, where public and Catholic schools were in a fiercely pitched battle over sharing taxpayer-funded facilities. McLaughlin was named head of the school, St. Paul Dual Enrollment School, which eventually meant 500 parochial students had access to chemistry and other expensive programs in the Chicago public schools.

“It worked,” McLaughlin says. “I think we did some real good work there.”

In Memphis, where a large batch of Catholic schools are now scheduled to close, some days, Brother Terence admits, it’s harder for him to see that the work here has paid off as much.

Jesse Turner Jr. sees it differently. His brother, Ray, became a psychologist; one of his clients is the Memphis Police Department. His little brother, Eric, earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Harvard University, and in the 1990s, was executive director of the Massachusetts State Lottery.

Turner Jr.’s youngest son, Brian, a recent graduate of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, is headed to Columbia University this fall after wrapping up a paid internship in architecture at Askew Nixon Ferguson.

“I was talking to one of the principals and I asked why they decided to offer my boy this chance,” he says. “The response was that the firm — this old white firm in Memphis — believes its internship program has had success in getting talented young people to return home.

“No one was thinking that way in 1962 when Brother Terence did what he did. The stone he dropped in the water ripples out with every generation,” Turner says.

“Things have changed immensely.”