Catholic school owned by lay people! - Hales High School, Chicago, Illinois - Cover Story

Commonweal, April 8, 1994 by Jim Bowman

Hales Franciscan High School on Chicago's South Side is black, all-boys, and Catholic. The Archdiocese of Chicago and the Franciscans sponsor it, identify with it, consider it part of the Catholic fold. But ownership is in the hands of a mostly lay board of eighteen trustees, and with them the buck stops. Hales is the only officially recognized Catholic high school in the United States thus owned.

At the center of this novel arrangement is a Hales graduate, Donald Hubert '66, a Chicago lawyer, member of the school's first four-year graduating class, and otherwise a totally Catholic-school product from primary school to Loyola University, right up to law school at the University of Michigan.

Hubert is an African-American from birth and Catholic from shortly thereafter. For him the Hales story is personal, life-changing, maybe even life-saving. He grew up in gangland Chicago, in the Rangers and Disciples rather than the Capone and Accardo tradition. As a kid on the South Side, he had Rangers to the north of him and Disciples to the south. A young man walked, shall we say, a fine line between the two, carefully and prudently. Hubert went to several grade schools--Saint Anselm, Saint Martin, Our Lady of Solace--and came time for high school, he was off to Hales, newly established in a black neighborhood, at 49th and Cottage Grove.

The ground was hallowed already, by decades of Sisters of Mercy presence. Their Saint Xavier's College (later university) had moved south and west to bigger and greener pastures in an area annexed for their purposes by the City of Chicago-- that' s how things happen in this Catholic city of cities.

Meanwhile back at 491h and Cottage: The Saint Louis-based Franciscans had a two-year, co-ed parish high school at nearby Corpus Christi. Seven priests, four sisters, and two (count 'em) lay teachers taught in this school at its peak enrollment of 385. The sisters left in 1957 and the place became a four-year, all-boys school. The Franciscans pitched the archdiocese for the nine acres vacated by the Mercys. The archdiocese gave them the land and put up $1 million to build the school. The resultant Hales Franciscan High School opened in the fall of 1962.

It was built for 600 and peaked at 550. Catholic school superintendent, Monsignor William E. McManus, later bishop of Fort Wayne-South Bend, and Cardinal-Archbishop Albert G. Meyer, Chicago's Old Milwaukee import, signed the papers. McManus called it "hallowed ground," again serving "the people of the neighborhood by giving its young men high-quality Catholic education."

One of them was Don Hubert, who did time as a stock boy at Del Farm grocery, at 63rd and what's now Martin Luther King Drive, rather than at the Audy Home or Saint Charles-- two options for teen-age offenders then and now. He thought that was what every kid did, work full-time at a grocery while attending high school. He did his homework when he got home at midnight and on weekends.

For two years, he played four sports, then took on the grocery job. Hales had a drama program under Father Barry Schneider, whose African Hamlet barnstormed in the Midwest. Hubert played the prince' s father. One of the stops was Carleton College, in Northfield, Minnesota, where white families took the kids in overnight, providing a strange and wonderful experience for the young black men of Hales, as Hubert recalls it.

He talks about it in his law office on the thirty-ninth floor of a nicely preserved tower building with elevator operators across Randolph Street from the Bismarck Hotel, "the Vatican of Chicago politics ." At the University of Michigan Law School he pulled average-good grades but did better than average in corporate law. He figures he might have gone into that esoteric branch of the profession if he were white. But as an alumnus not only of Hales but of the Woodlawn neighborhood, he went for the gold buried in criminal work, moving eventually to "complex civil litigation."

He even got political work, from Cook County Board President George Dunne and later from Harold Washington's mayoral administration as well. (Dunne, a durable Irishman, was a solid supporter of Harold Washington.) This is how it works, of course. Winners divide spoils here as in most places.

And old boys look after other old boys. Which brings Hubert round to the Hales question. He was a loyal alumnus of the school when the wolf came knocking at its door in 1989. The archdiocese, increasingly handling nickels like sewer covers, told him, $82,000 by tomorrow, or the school closes. Hubert forked over the $82,000. The wolf went away, but it went away hungry.

Hubert and his "acting board of regents" set about raising the required cash and did rather well for a couple years, hosting a "classic Black" benefit at Orchestra Hall, a black-tie affair featuring singer Nancy Wilson and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. More to the point, the school got $500,000 in a matching grant from G.D. Searle & Company, whose CEO read of its plight in the newspaper.