By Bill McGraw
The Catholic Church in Detroit has a long history of priests, nuns and brothers who go beyond preaching and teaching to tend to the needy, confront racism and promote peace. Some, like Monsignor Clement Kern, Bishop Thomas Gumbleton and the Capuchins, become well-known, even among non-Catholics.
Nobody, though, had a higher profile than the Rev. William Cunningham. For 30 years, until he died in 1997, at 67, Cunningham was metro Detroit’s star Catholic clergyman. He was a cigar-smoking, Dewars-drinking, Harley-driving priest who co-founded Focus: Hope and built it into one of the nation’s most unique charities, visited and praised by VIPs from President Bill Clinton to George H.W. Bush (when he served as vice president) to Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
Cunningham was aggressive, impatient and resourceful, a master fund-raiser who excelled at negotiating bureaucracies and wheedling money out of Washington. He was so cocky that he often launched new programs without having the necessary funds in hand, assuming he could raise them.
He was also a fearless rabble-rouser on the Detroit area’s most sensitive issue, race. Cunningham, who was white, relished making white people squirm.
Before he died, Cunningham made it clear that despite his fame and achievements, he did not want his name on a street or building. He was o.k. with a biography, though, and he has one now. “Hope in the City: A Catholic Priest, a Suburban Housewife and their Desperate Effort to Save Detroit,” by Jack Kresnak, a retired reporter at the Free Press, (where he and I were colleagues).
NEARLY TWO DECADES after his death, Cunningham’s memory has started to fade, but Kresnak brings him roaring back to life in all of his in-your-face vividness. Kresnak’s portrait underscores Cunningham’s audacity: He was a radical who thought big, a doer who interpreted his role as going far beyond the pulpit, a brash and somewhat egotistical cleric who made a significant difference in the lives of poor Detroiters.
He certainly was an original. Cunningham, Kresnak writes, was basically a street-smart, sweet-talking Irish guy from St. Mary’s of Redford parish on Grand River. He wore a Roman collar and black suit, so you knew he was a priest. But he also wore Italian boots, a leather jacket and long wavy hair.
He was constantly looking for the edge, even as an English teacher at Sacred Heart Seminary, where in the late 1960s he showed druggy, sexy “Easy Rider” to young men studying to be priests. He walked two Bouvier des Flandres dogs during midnight strolls through the tough, central Detroit neighborhood around the Church of the Madonna, the parish he ran on Oakman Boulevard while simultaneously running Focus: Hope. (Madonna is now named St. Moses the Black.)
Cunningham was also a hunk. Many women considered him attractive, to the point where he occasionally had to remind people he never had strayed from his vow of celibacy, and he never intended to do so, writes Kresnak, who met Cunningham in the 1960s at Sacred Heart, where Kresnak attended high school.
In July 1967, Cunningham was living at the seminary, at Linwood and W. Chicago, when the riot ignited four blocks away. He heard the guns and smelled the smoke, and one morning during the riot week, as he rode his Harley to celebrate mass at a west-side church, someone fired a shot at him.
Not surprisingly, the riot left Cunningham rattled. The Detroit archdiocese of the late 1960s was considered one of the most liberal in the United States, and long before the civil unrest, Cunningham had preached about racism, a message not all Catholics wanted to hear. In 1965, he marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. As the riot ended, Cunningham vowed to devote his life to working for racial justice, asking himself, “How can I go back to what I was doing?”
He partnered with a friend, Eleanor Josaitis, at right in the above photo, a suburban mother living in Taylor, to bring food and clothing to people in the riot-torn neighborhoods. Josaitis turned out to be a brilliant partner: She was the tough manager at Focus: Hope through the years, took over after Cunningham's death and ran the organization until she died in 2011.
Feeding the needy was the underpinning of Focus: HOPE, which was officially founded a few months later to train priests and laypeople in a broad strategy to stave off a riot many people feared would break out in 1968. There was no riot that summer, but Focus: Hope moved on. Shortly after the death of King, in 1968, Cunningham organized a “Rally for Hope” on Easter Sunday at the University of Detroit. More than 7,000 people showed up.
CUNNINGHAM WAS MILITANT from the start. He angered local food-industry leaders by organizing a fact-finding campaign that exposed the high prices and poor conditions among inner-city supermarkets and grocery stores. He also promoted good nutrition; passed out food; attacked segregation; organized mixed-race block clubs to fight white flight and publicly shamed Birmingham residents in 1978 after they voted against a proposed development that would have used federal funds for low-income – and integrated – housing in the wealthy, all-white suburb.
Cunningham saw the vote as hypocritical and racially motivated, Kresnak writes, quoting Cunningham as saying, “What really troubles me is a kind of moral rupture – the tearing away from, the blind denial of, something which made the vote possible: the freedom of people to choose to deny a part of their freedom to others.”
Kresnak writes: “Cunningham was fearless when it came to confronting white people living far from the problems of inner-city Detroit."
In one of his boldest attacks on the corporate status quo, Cunningham zeroed on the Automobile Club of Michigan after AAA announced it would move its headquarters from downtown Detroit to Dearborn, which in 1972 was run by Mayor Orville Hubbard, the outspoken segregationist.
Cunningham branded Dearborn “Hubbard’s apartheid reservation,” and, believing that Detroit’s white corporate leaders needed to be held accountable for their post-riot rush to the suburbs, called the AAA board and management “racists.” Focus: HOPE eventually filed anti-discrimination lawsuits that kept the auto club in court for nearly a decade. The legal battle became a public-relations nightmare for AAA, which finally reached a settlement with Focus: HOPE.
Cunningham eventually expanded Focus: Hope’s footprint along Oakman and enlarged its programs to include a children’s center and facilities for training machinists. It established a complicated relationship with the Pentagon, to the dismay of critics, including his friend, the peace activist Gumbleton, who were dismayed that a Catholic priest who fed the poor was allowing himself to become entangled in the war machine.
Cunningham also rebelled against the church’s obsession with the unborn, preferring to concentrate on making sure living children had enough to eat.
“While the Catholic Church is spinning its wheels about abortion, hundreds of thousands of babies already born are starving to death and nobody apparently gives a damn,” Cunningham once said.
THE ARCHDIOCESE IS LED TODAY by a conservative cultural warrior, Archbishop Allen Vigneron, who has led marches on abortion clinics while reciting the rosary. Parishes sometimes protest abortion by planting hundreds of small white crosses on their lawns. But such public displays about poverty or racism, in one the nation’s poorest and most segregated big city, are rare. There is certainly no priest, nun or brother in metro Detroit -- or anyone, for that matter -- who combines Cunningham’s high profile, outsized vision, defiant nature and list of accomplishments. And that’s metro Detroit’s loss.
Kresnak’s “Hope for the City” is a biography, but it is not the life of a saint. Cunningham is brought to life, sins and all. He could be a hotheaded narcissist, but he left an imprint on the region that will last for years.
► "Hope for the City ($25) is available at www.ccpublishinghouse.org Half of the proceeds go to Focus: Hope.
Bill McGraw, co-founder of Deadline Detroit, is a staff writer at Bridge Magazine.
