April 15, 2011
Joe Dulin
Evansville native to be honored by African-American Museum
Evansville native Joe Dulin, a long-time Catholic educator, will be honored by the African-American museum in Evansville on April 18. Click for a larger version.
By MARY ANN HUGHES (Message staff writer)
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Martin Luther King Jr.
Joe Dulin has faced adversity in his life — many, many times in many different ways — but it didn’t break him.
He was strengthened by it, and today he’s defined by it.
He’s an Evansville native, who attended St. John the Apostle School in downtown Evansville, and then Mater Dei High School on Evansville’s westside.
Evansville was a segregated city then with few rights for African-Americans, something Dulin figured out at an early age. “We are born into that,” he explains.
He was only five or six when he learned his first lesson about life as an African-American child.
His father gave him money to go to a restaurant to buy a hamburger. The understanding at the time was that African-Americans would purchase their food at this particular restaurant and receive a “to go” bag.
Dulin decided that he wanted to eat his food in the restaurant. “I ate it there, and the guy called the police.” Dulin’s father was also called, and the police told him they were going to take the child “for a little ride and scare him a little bit.”
“My father said, ‘he’s not scared.’”
Dulin remembers, “I learned a lot from that.”
A few years later he joined the NAACP youth council and became a leader in the group.
When it was time for him to decide where to go to high school, he chose the newly-opened Mater Dei High School. Father William Lautner was the superintendent there at the time, and he took the young student under his wing. “Under the leadership of Father Lautner, I felt comfortable at Mater Dei. I didn’t have any fears.”
Dulin remembers attending a football game in Henderson, Ky., a place that was “very segregated.” During the game, he was sitting in the student section cheering for his team when a policeman told him, “You can’t sit here.”
Father Lautner told the policeman, “If he doesn’t sit here, we don’t play the game.”
He stayed, and the game continued.
Dulin played basketball at Mater Dei, and remembers a game in Paducah, Ky. The school there had a policy that the “negroes had to sit on the stage and go in the side door. We decided to go in the front door — and we did.”
He wasn’t allowed to stay in the hotel there with his team members; instead, he stayed with an African-American family in Paducah.
Despite the conflicts, he enjoyed his high school years and he loved Mater Dei. “Mater Dei was my heart. I wore my Mater Dei jacket everywhere I went. It was my passport. You were treated with respect.”
In 1953, during his senior year “Father Lautner called me into the office and asked me, ‘Where are you going to go to college?’ He suggested that I go to St. Joe’s in Rensselaer. He said, ‘It’s all white, and I think you’ll do well there.’”
The experience was “pretty nice,” he said. “I challenged them. I ran into some segregation, but it didn’t bother me. The faculty was very much open, and I wrote letters to the student body. My dad mortgaged his home so I could finish college.”
He remembers returning to Evansville after his freshman year at college. “I thought I was as smart as the white kids.” At the time there were two public swimming pools in town, one that was “whites only,” and one for African-Americans.
That summer some “kids came to me and said they wanted to go to the whites only pool. I said we would go tomorrow. About 20 kids went to the pool on Fulton Avenue. They refused to let us in the building. They called the police, and the police said, ‘You have your own swimming pool.’”
The decision was made by the city to close the pool. That was okay with Dulin. “They couldn’t swim. We couldn’t swim. A few weeks later, they opened the pool to everyone — everyone except me,” he laughed. “I don’t swim.”
Because of the role models he had in the teachers at St. John School, he decided to become a teacher himself. After graduating from college with a bachelor’s degree in physical education, he sent out 200 resumes. He received no replies.
Finally, Father Joseph Wagner from West Point, Iowa, called about a job at St. Mary High School there. “I told him I was African-American, and he told me he didn’t care what I was — he needed a teacher.”
Dulin still remembers arriving in the small town, population 700, and finding the town empty. “They were all in the church for a funeral.”
“Iowa was a good place. I stayed there six years. Many people there had never seen a black person before. I was strict,” he said, remembering the students who were all farm kids. “They had to do their chores after school so we had [basketball] practice at 7 p.m.
“I didn’t have a place to stay so I stayed at the rectory for four to five months. The priest ran the town. He stood up and said, ‘He’s colored, and I want you to treat him with respect.’”
Dulin still speaks “very highly of Iowa. I knew everybody, and I walked every where. It was a German community, and I had come from a German community at Mater Dei. I wasn’t afraid.”
He lived with the town’s insurance agent and his family, although some had warned the man that he might lose his business if he housed Dulin. That didn’t happen. Instead, “he was elected mayor of the town.”
One day a friend opened his wallet and handed Dulin $1,000. “I had never seen that much money before. He told me to go and get my master’s degree. I went in the summer to Indiana State. It was very segregated.”
With his new degree in hand, he decided he had to go “where there are black people because I believe that ‘to whom much is given, much is required.’ I took a job in the public school system in Detroit. I saw blacks driving buses, blacks driving cabs, doctors, lawyers. I had never seen that.”
In the mid 1960s, he was named principal at St. Martin de Porres High School in Detroit becoming the first African-American lay Catholic school principal in the country. The school had always been run by “white nuns and all the staff was white.” That summer, the city of Detroit erupted with riots. “The whole town was in uproar, and several people were killed during that time.”
In the early 1970s, he had a leadership role in the National Black Catholic Lay Caucus, traveling to Rome to talk with the pope’s representative about naming more African-American bishops in the United States.
His life was threatened “several times,” he said. Looking back at those days, he believes “the Catholic Church is better off because of what we challenged it to do.”
Today, Dulin is a retired educator, still living in Michigan. He has fond memories of his years at Mater Dei, a place he always visits when he comes home to Evansville. “Even if Mater Dei is closed, I sit in that parking lot and think of the experiences I had there.”
He also remembers the man who saw him through some tough times, Msgr. William Lautner. “He had a tremendous influence on me.
“He said everybody at Mater Dei was family. Even though my color was different, I was part of the family. That’s been my theme in Iowa and in Detroit — that we are all family. I wrote to him up until he died, and I pray to him every day. He was a tremendous part of my life.”
Dulin will be honored on April 18 by the African-American Museum during a ceremony at 7 p.m. at Lincoln School in Evansville. That morning, he will speak to students at Mater Dei .
In August, he will return to Evansville to help his childhood parish, St. John’s, celebrate its seventieth anniversary.