America has always built upon a wide mixture of ethnic and racial groups. There is a popular mythology that immigrants to America initially faced the basic problems of survival and then the equally formidable adaptation to an Anglo-Protestant culture. Recent scholarship has challenged this mythology by documenting the influx of many non-English immigrants and a surprising number of non-Protestants during all of America’s history. In the 19th century when large numbers of Irish and German immigrants presented themselves to America’s shores, the Protestant leadership (never completely homogeneous itself) worried that founding traditions would be eroded.

Their anxiety was both overly selective and myopic. The official Protestant establishment did not fully represent the diversity of the American citizenry, however much they insisted that their values were coincident with the country’s. Then and now, America’s national imagery and rhetoric have masked the ethnic and racial diversity of the country, and even more, the constructive contribution that immigrant ingenuity and energy have made in the shaping of American society.

Elizabeth NJ’s history is instructive in clarifying the dynamics of this larger national story. The 1868 HISTORY OF ELIZABETH NJ by Rev. Edwin Hatfield is a narrative of religious and political crises that reasonable and civil men settled among themselves. Hatfield was surely mindful in 1868 of the larger crisis that the nation had faced in its Civil War. He implicitly offered one model of how a community reshaped itself through debate and legal processes. The author acknowledged a Dutch presence early on in the 17th century and spottily an African-American presence – usually associated with rioting and mayhem. Principally, however, it is a story of English-speaking Anglicans and Presbyterians tolerating each other within a Protestant framework. There is no mention of the Protestant backlash that drove out early Catholic residents from Elizabeth in the 1820s. There is also a great regard for the Presbyterian leader, Rev. Nicholas Murray but no mention of his part in the sale of land on the Southern side of the Elizabeth river for an early Catholic parish. By the 1840s the construction of railroads throughout central New Jersey put the NJ Railroad and Transportation company, the Elizabeth and Somerville Railroad and the Delaware and Lackawana Railroad on the alert for brawny laborers.

The incoming Irish became a necessary labor resource, momentarily overcoming earlier fears of an alien and diabolical religious commitment. Murray sought to encourage a stabilizing church to insure a basic decorum and civility among the rough and untamed workmen, who they regularly depicted in their magazines with disparaging images.

St Mary’s Church (f 1844) appeared on Elizabeth’s horizon in this context of tentative hospitality. And in part, the Protestant suspicion of Catholic Irishmen translated into a need for the Irish to use their church as a rallying point for their distinctive community. The Irish sense of themselves as a group apart was only underscored by the impact of the 1846 Irish potato famine.

Hordes of Irish left their homeland – indeed a quarter of their 8 million population died or departed as a consequence of the famine – for Canada, Australia and America. Even more important, for successive generations of Irish was the memory, not only of starvation but of English indifference. “God brought the potato blight,” one familiar adage insisted, “but the British brought the famine.

Even into the 20th century Irishmen often buried their differences in the face of external threats by hostile Protestant cultures. The memory of a collective injury – made possible by popular woodcuts like those just shown – became an ongoing, reusable resource in keeping impacted Irish loyal to their church and sustaining themselves as a social oasis in crowded American cities.

In post Civil War America, the Irish had the distinct advantage of speaking the native tongue (or at least they thought they spoke English). Many Irish immigrants served on both sides of the Civil War and especially for veterans of the victorious Northern Army, many Protestants considered the Irish risk of life and limb for national unity merited the reward of US citizenship. Wartime loyalty trumped the suspicions about an Irish Catholic Church. Others were not so sure that eventually the Church allegiance would not be a Trojan Horse. This mixed assessment, however, was often complicated because the Irishmen’s English literacy meant easy access into many public employments – police units and fire companies, public school teaching, music and entertainment, and above all, labor unions and politics. By the early 20th century the Irish held a substantive presence in basic social and cultural roles: acting and education, government service and domestic work, and increasingly the health and legal professions. By adhering to special brands of self-effacing humor, poetic oratory, and a adaptive joie de vivre, Irishmen “assimilated” to American expectations by transforming America’s clichés of the Irish.

In spite of this expansive outreach into American culture the Catholic Church in America promoted self-consciously nationalistic churches. In Elizabeth St Mary’s was Irish in its origins and leadership, as was St Patrick’s (f 1858) in Elizabethport (though its longtime pastor was German – Rev Martin Gessner) and Sacred Heart (f1871) on Spring Street. St Michael’s (1852) was predominantly German; Sts Peter and Paul (1895) was Lithuanian; St Anthony’s (1895) was Italian; and St Adalbert’s (1905) was Polish; in 1973 Sacred Heart became Our

Lady of Fatima and moved its allegiances from the Irish to Portuguese. But were these distinctly nationalistic parishes as homogeneous as they seemed, and if so, did their very coherence help or hinder the immigrant acquisition of an American inheritance? A recent sampling of St Mary’s neighborhood – based on data from the US Federal Census – shows some fascinating patterns in this “Irish” parish.

First and foremost, the ethnic and religious variety of St Mary’s neighborhood draws special attention to the sociological truism that American Catholic parishes have stabilized urban neighborhoods for much of the 20th century. They did so primarily by providing their congregants, often working class communicants, not only with spiritual focus but with an array of social channels: youth activities like the scouts; young adult dances, literary associations, choir and picnics; Holy Name, Rosary and Sodality societies for seasoned members, and above all, organized sports for all seasons.

St Mary’s provided these concentric circles of activity, filling many voids for congregants without leisure time or extra money for entertainment. In addition, the Sisters of Charity opened, first, in the 1870s an elementary school, then in 1930 a high school, plus an essential health care facility in St Elizabeth’s hospital. The entire network rooted neighborhood residents into their larger city community when, later in the inter war period and after World War II, less grounded households relocated to the suburbs. While many parishes aspired to such an organizational matrix, St Mary’s distinctively contributed an Irish tradition in the form of its pastors. With a few exceptions from the time of the Civil War, the names of St Mary’s pastors – Kane, Corrigan, Kiernan, O’Neill, Larkin – put a public face to a parish whose actual Irish-born members was steadily declining.

In the first third of the 20th century two men – Rev Francis O’Neill and Rev James Lundy – led the parish from 1891 to 1936. In 1930 Pastor James Lundy, age 32, like his curates – Rev. James Neafsey and Thomas Conroy – were all young NJ natives with Irish immigrant parents. Similarly in 1930 nine of the 15 nuns (average age 48) residing in St Mary convent on South Broad street, had at least one Irish born parent. The convent head – Sr Loretta Cecelia O’Leary, age 53 – a NJ native, nevertheless had both parents Irish immigrants.

Not all neighborhood adolescents attend St Mary’s of course; many non-Catholics from this neighborhood clearly attended public school. Hence into the 1960s most of St Mary’s Elementary and High School students posted a selective roster of Irish, Italian, Polish and a sprinkling of German and Lithuanian names. Still, given their public face and leadership, the parish was “Irish.”

It is perhaps worth noting that parishes like St Mary’s and earlier Sacred Heart became successful not simply because of organizational and fiscal probity. 

Later principals of St Mary’s High School like Sr Matilda Zegers SC underscores the point. Sr. Matilda (principal at St Mary’s for 27 years [elem 1961-64] [St M HS 1964-87]) was a formidable presence but sought most of all to create an institutional esprit, an non-ethnic organizational culture that prodded both students and teachers alike to overachievement.. She and her teachers, one interviewee insisted, “would literally will their class to come along with them: we’re going to learn this – we will learn this … I think they had expectations that were obtainable … for about 50 kids in a class!” The same elevating espirt, others have attributed to Sr Matilda’s fellow Sister of Charity, Sr. Ellen Patricia Mead, who for many years shaped St Elizabeth’s Hospital into a facility that the neighborhood and the city felt was cutting edge.

It is not clear how another “Irish” neighborhood acquired its ethnic characterization. Keighry Head had originally called itself simply “North Elizabeth.” From its development for factory workers by Edward Kellogg in the 1850s, the area centered on an area named after Kellogg family members: Julia, Laura, Olive, Mary, Emma, Flora, Anna and straddled Spring St (now Rtes 1 & 9). The emergent Irish population probably had issues with German-dominant parish of St Michael’s which insisted strongly on German baptismal names whatever the family tradition.

(Ex: Henrich O’Malley, Wilhem Gatti] In 1871 the Newark archdiocese created a new parish, first St Henry’s, then in the early 1880s renamed it Sacred Heart. The new parish was staffed by the Order of St Benedict from Newark’s St Mary’s Abbey and led by a sequence of leaders of German and Irish descent. They too quickly created an elementary and then a high school and many of the larger social networks that paralleled St Mary’s organization. Similar to St Mary’s but more rapidly, Sacred Heart’s neighborhood continued to increase its foreign-born percentage, with German-born household heads representing (29%) to the Irish-born (20%).

German and Irish over the next two decades. The percentage of foreign-born, however, did not decrease but increased to a solid half of the residents, drawing upon the incoming dislocated of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By 1930 Keighry Head’s Irish-born immigrants represented but 18% of our neighborhood sample. Perhaps more to the point, possibly because of greater proximity to the Singer Sewing Machine plant, half of Keighry Head residents in the 1910-30 period were skilled laborers, benefiting by union-buttressed wages and with decidedly American middle-class aspirations.

In the 1920s, as America’s war production converted to peacetime industry, the state of New Jersey decided to expand access to the Holland tunnel and Hudson river crossings. In Elizabeth they planned to widen Spring Street from a busy, tree-shaded, two-lane highway into a modern multi-laned thoroughfare. This expansion divided Keighry Head and indeed Sacred Heart parish. Immediately the Newark diocese created in the early 1920s a parish on North Avenue they named Blessed Sacrament, also staffed by Newark Benedictines. The immediate impact on Sacred Heart was a gigantic engineering project-the hoisting of the 3000 ton church onto steel skids and moving it 80 feet back and 11 feet sideways. Its original neighborhood was literally razed to make room for the highway. Even before the destructive force of the Great Depression in 1929, our sample statistics suggest that the result was a rise in unskilled residents and a decline in householders with skills or managerial talent.

The statistics do not tell the entire story because the work of the church for 50+ years had created, however fanciful, the experience of a common culture. For the Irish in Keighry Head, however minority their actual status, their basic routines made Keighry Head “home.” This home generally consisted of a multi-family domicile, where child-care and supervision became a collective responsibility. Growing up in such families gave children a sense of

three and four sets of parents. Any important difficulty for anyone family generally resulted in a large meal to which all family members came.

After the meal the difficulty was collectively discussed and addressed. When larger quarters were needed for any one family, one interviewee has explained, one found a larger house in Keighry Head. Not until after World War II did family members consider the suburbs a possibility. From the viewpoint of those who remained in Elizabeth, the budding suburban family members displayed an element of disloyalty to family and their city place.

Ultimately the sale of the family residence, however necessary or practical, became a wrenching experience.

Young Irish girls faced a particularly poignant version of this familial solidarity. Every family member grilled a young woman with a boyfriend. “Is he Catholic,” was the first question. “Is the Oirish” was the second. The lore of most families recalled no late lights and an adult awake and alert until the young woman returned home from a date. Through such a phalanx it is a wonder that any Irish married non-Irish. Yet nationally the Irish produced more single women in their immigrant patterns to America than any other ethnic group, and more importantly, over half of them did NOT marry Irish men! The Irish of 

Keighry Head may have given a special veneer to their multi-ethnic neighborhood, but the powerful forces of assimilation assured that marriage and family became the primary engines that broke down inter-ethnic reservation and bias.

During the 1930s and 1940s many non-Irish moved into Keighry Head. (Germans, Czechs, Poles, Romanians, Hungarians and a sizeable group of Italians, alongside English and Scottish newcomers). In part because of wartime industry, many African-Americans poured out of the South. Usually these itinerants were able bodied and among the best educated of Southern blacks. They often sought out industrial cities in the North but as frequently towns and suburbs on the metropolitan fringe. These migrants came from an agricultural culture and sought living quarters that permitted them gardens. In Keighry Head, African Americans had resided since 1920, usually on Olive Street or Spring Street, like George Brooke in 1930 whose family originated in North Carolina and Georgia.

The prevalence of African-Americans in postwar Keighry Head resulted in increased memberships for New Zion Baptist church and Siloam Hope Presbyterian Church. It also spelled a decline for Sacred Heart Church, since most African-Americans were not Catholic. However, the Newark Archdiocese, shortly after Sacred Heart celebrated its centenary in 1971, proposed a merger of Sacred Heart and an emergent Portuguese congregation in Elizabethport. After much soul-searching and worry about upsetting deep-seated emotional ties, the church changed its name to Our Lady of Fatima in 1973.

The new congregation set about to modernize the buildings’ interiors and to apply the Portuguese’s well-known skills in masonry, carpentry, electrical and plumbing work. The emergent parish, now activated for every age group , has become a hive of activity, particularly on weekends and holidays, becoming once again a model of the nationalist (Portuguese, not Brazilian or Latino) church so dominant at the turn of the century.

By contrast, St Mary’s has gradually conceded that is no longer primarily a distinctly ethnic, especially, an Irish parish. Similar to the experience of Sacred Heart, after the 1960s an influx of Hispanic peoples – Central American, Caribbean and Filipino –dominated the church membership and produced a well-attended mass in Spanish. Msgr Robert Harrington, St Mary’s current pastor, follows a model not of a cohesive nationalist identity but one more internationalist. The church itself becomes a ”bridge” for multi-ethnic and multi-racial interaction, a device for encouraging mutual understanding. In addition to many traditional organizations, the parish now hosts, for example, a highly popular dinner in which every ethnic and racial group represents itself with a distinctive meal to be sampled by others.

In actual fact, St Mary’s has followed this international model pragmatically for many years, while insisting on its Irish identity, an association some members with deep parish allegiances still do not wish to relinquish.

Just as originally there was no homogeneous Protestant culture to which immigrants necessarily adapted, each immigrant tradition brought with it multiple, internal variations. People’s “parish” allegiances – more important than one’s street address or actual place of origin – seemed on one level to make the notion of a cohesive city highly fragmented and disjointed.

Yet in another sense, this patchwork sensibility grounded each individual in a rooted, residential place, a point of allegiance from which every citizen ventured out into the opportunities that the larger society offered. Urban or metropolitan cohesion is historically never a simple thing: at times it has meant one dominant ethnic group identified by its church; at others the church itself encompasses many traditions and tolerates distinctions within the whole. At still other times a putative attribution, like an “Irish neighborhood,” or a “Protestant America” over-privileges one group among many.

Each of these constructs produces a distinctive brand of American assimilation, and in a city, striving to make democratic values functional realities, each seems to require from the responsible citizen, not simply a range of choices and problems, but necessarily a distinctive historical understanding of one’s place and time.

I grew up on Olive St. – the edge of Keighry Head. My parents, almost life long residents of Elizabeth – my father moved here in 1915 at the age of one and my Mother moved here in 1921 at the age of 3 and they died in Elizabeth in 1984 and 1986 respectively.

They bought a home at 906 Olive St. one hundred feet from the south corner of Henry St. on October 28, 1950 for the sum of $3, 7000. They purchased this home in anticipation of my birth that did occur on January 10, 1951 and I resided in that house until the age of 22.

My parents loved this city and never had a desire to leave. Most black adults I knew growing up felt the same way. Most whites I knew felt the same way until the late 1960’s when the whites very orderly and quietly began moving from Olive St. to either north westerly parts of Keighry Head or west of the City to Cranford and Clark or south to Sayreville or Toms River.

But, their vision of what should have been should not stop us from honoring what they did and including in our honors, the work and contributions of our ancestors – those marginalized by the Carteret’s and the Bonnell’s but so important to the McBean’s, and the Mattingly’s and the Epps and the Novickie’s and Faella’s and Haggerty’s of Keighry Head and William Street, and South Park St., and South Broad St and Washington Ave. All played a role in making Elizabeth what it is in 2006 and all those contributions should be documented and memorialized and we all have a role to play in that memorialization.

Good times and bad. Triumphs and tragedies. Financial crunches and great prosperity are all parts of our history. Our past is part of our teaching. Our present is what we celebrate. Our future is what we are building.