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PAGE 6 — The Georgia Bulletin, June 20, 1985
He Struggles To
Keep Neighborhoods Color-Blind
BY GRETCHEN REISER
“The deacons’ understanding of their mission and
ministry should impel them individually and collec
tively to be more passionate in their defense of human
rights and human dignity, more determined in their
quest for racial justice and social equality, more en
thusiastic in their support of religious and civic causes,
more resolute in their attempts to establish genuine
community....”
Bishop Howard Hubbard
Albany, N. Y.
The roots of Larry French’s new assignment as a perma
nent deacon go back over 10 years and spring from the very
neighborhood where he and his wife, Barbara, a nurse, and
their four children live,
A native of Chicago who did a tour in Vietnam and spent
five years in the Army after graduating from the Universi
ty of Toledo, Ohio, French had his own financial planning
Larry French
...a new diaconate assignment
husiness and lived in the Flat Shoals area near South
DeKalb Mall. After a Cursillo weekend, which sparked his
Christianity, he jokingly recalls that he “got religion” and
“began to have fun working around my church,” Sts. Peter
and Paul in Decatur. By 1974 he’d been hired by the pastor,
Father Henry Gracz, as a full-time lay worker, helping with
parish organization and finances, among other things.
But then a dramatic change began to take place in Fren
ch’s neighborhood and around Sts. Peter and Paul and the
focus of his work narrowed with a burning intensity around
a singularly unpopular cause: the support of integrated
neighborhoods against all pressure.
As Fench recalls it, black families began to move into the
predominantly white neighborhoods around the church. He
alledges that realtors acted in discriminatory and
unscrupulous fashion to “turn over the neighborhood,” not
turning it into an integrated area,but by using fear and pre
judice, turning it into a black neighborhood from which
white families would flee.
“Why do they do that?” he asked rhetorically about the
real estate firms. “Money. In the ’70s we figured out they
would make $3 million in commissions by turning over the
neighborhood. They generated for themselves additional
millions in revenue and they are still doing it. They just
have moved on to new neighborhoods.”
The term “block busting” does not refer to real estate
people moving a black family in to a previously all white
neighborhood, French said emphatically. “Block-busting is
the practice of real estate people going into the
neighborhood, spreading fear and gossip and lies about
what is going to happen because blacks are moving in.”
As he saw what was happening in his'neighborhood and
parish, French went to his pastor and parish council. “I
said, ‘This is terrible, this is most unchristian thing going
on anywhere. The church is moving en masse because we
have black people moving in — Christian black people.’”
Moved by his plea, the parish council told French to work
as the parish liaison in this area, releasing him from all
other responsibilities. The fight was joined and “we started
dealing with it,” he said.
Ten years may have passed, but the toughness of the fight
is still apparent as he speaks. “We wrote all over the na
tion” looking for other neighborhoods that were in similar
struggles, to “share experiences, find out what the laws
are, what’s effective.” Among the illegal actions, French
said, is “steering,” where a realtor only brings one racial
group to the neighborhood to view homes, steering others
elsewhere. “My neighbor across the street collected 97
realtors cards” during the height of the intense pressure on
the neighborhood, French recalled. “Ninety-seven realtors
could not bring one white family to my neighborhood.
That’s illegal.”
Joining together with an ecumenical coalition of churches
who were fighting the block-busting — Columbia Crossways
— two avenues of opposition emerged. One was to come up
with a listing service for homes which bypassed realty
firms and attempted to keep the homes open to all ap
plicants, regardless of race. The second was to start a
testing program, which would check up on realty firms to
determine if they were steering particular people to the
neighborhood and not showing available homes to
everyone. The testing service was the seed which grew into
the agency where French now works, Metro Fair Housing.
Their first office outside of Sts. Peter and Paul Church
was a trailer in South DeKalb Mall, French recalls, and to
combat the out-of-the-way location they were given, they
painted the trailer pumpkin orange. The fight had its per
sonal costs, as well. French, Frather Gracz and others at
Sts. Peter and Paul parish were sued for $4.5 million each in
a suit by a realty firm that was later thrown out of court.
Personal attacks on him grew so intense, French said, that
“I put in writing the threat to sue if it didn’t stop.”
“I was accused of rotten, rotten stuff,” he said.
The second wave came when South DeKalb developed the
highest foreclosure rate in the nation as families who had
moved in to the area began to be threatened with losing
their homes. “They put in people in these homes some of
whom didn’t even know they were buying-homes — they
thought they were renting,” he said. Metro Fair Housing
began to work with families threatened with foreclosure
and loss of their homes, and has been able to prevent
foreclosure for over. 1,000 families, French said.
Repeatedly, French calls himself a “struggling Chris
tian,” but insists that it is necessary to struggle and not set
tle for less than the Gospel demands. In his own
neighborhood, a coalition called the Flat Shoals Alliance
has kept it a “beautiful neighborhood,” he says. “We were
not successful in being able to stop realtors from steering,
(Continued on Page 13)
. . . He Judges Evidence In A Different Court
BY GRETCHEN REISER
“Deacons must be liberated from calculated plans,
systems and patterns that promise them security and
definite solutions to life’s problems so that they might
allow the Holy Spirit to move them where he will, to
move them into the uncharted courses of our unpredic
table God, who is predictable only in his call to lead us
from any place and situation where we may have com
fortably settled.”
Bishop Howard Hubbard
Albany, N. Y.
Deacon John Cicala works out of a spartan office on the
third floor of the Catholic Center in downtown Atlanta.
A volunteer at the Metropolitan Tribunal -- the depart
ment which decides upon marriage annulment cases -- he
can be seen three days a week bent over a sheaf of papers, a
studious figure engrossed in what he reads. White-haired
and courteous, Cicala projects an aura of deliberation as he
speaks, a sense that he has been interviewed before and
knows how to be gracious and yet speak with care.
Indeed, it turns out that this unobtrusive post is far in
many ways from where John Cicala has been in the past.
Far, yet there is a thread of continuity which he believes is
providential.
In the past he would have been robed and seated on the
bench as a judge of Connecticut’s Circuit Court and later
the state’s Superior Court.
Despite Cicala’s quiet manner, the chief judge of the Cir
cuit Court perceived something else and assigned him to
handle cases primarily having to do with organized crime.
“The chief judge seemed to think I had some talent, so to
speak, for handling criminal matters and particularly mat
ters involving organized crime - dealing with it in an expe
dient manner,” Cicala said. “Consequently he assigned me
to various circuits in the state where the need was
prevalent.”
Loan sharking, illegal gambling, policy playing, drugs
were the crimes that came up regularly in Bridgeport,
Hartford and Waterbury where Judge Cicala sat on the
bench.
Sometimes there were crimes of violence, but murder
cases, after a preliminary hearing in his court, were hand
ed over to a higher court.
Cicala, pressed about the reputation he had serving in
this area for 10 years, says with a wry smile, “the hanging
judge.” But, he says “Once lawyers got to know me, they
trusted me.” Often, they sought a trial by judge, rather
than jury, he said, which he believes showed their regard
for his knowledge of the law and fairness.
A native of West Haven, Conn., he rose to the bench after
serving as corporation counsel for the city of West Haven
and, prior to that, practicing law privately. In Connecticut
judges are appointed for life, rather than elected, so his ap
pointment in the late 1950s normally would have meant
many years as a judge.
Instead, severe health problems and a series of heart at
tacks forced him to seek early retirement.
At the same time, apparently because of his handling of
organized crime cases, he and his family were threatened
and harassed. “There were periods of time when the Con
necticut State Police were on our property for weeks at a
time. They would follow me to the courthouse and back,” he
recalled. The threats continued even into his retirement,
which took place in 1968.
It’s clear that Cicala, who graduated from Yale Universi
ty and the University of Connecticut Law School, would
have preferred to stay on the bench longer and he admits he
struggled severly with the limitations his health placed
upon him and fought early retirement.
Yet, in retirement, a seed of devotion to the Church,
which had been in the background during his years as a
judge, began to grow.
His wife, Terry, pointed out an article in the Miami ar
chdiocesan newspaper about study for the permanent
diaconate. Coming from a “close and very church-oriented
family,” Cicala went to daily Mass and said, “somewhere
way back, I may have had thoughts of becoming a priest.”
With the time now available, and the encouragement of his
wife and pastor, “it didn’t take too much nudging for me to
go into the diaconate.”
Miami’s intensive three-year program, which included
spending one weekend a month at the regional seminary
and one night a week studying Scripture, had an unusual
dimension for his class of 11. The program included study
over three years in canon law, the law of the Church, taught
by the head of the Miami Metropolitan Tribunal. In addi
tion, Cicala took a 20-hour course, studying the grounds for
annulments and helping people in the preliminary stage of
seeking an annulment.
John Cicala
...a second profession
While all this preparation took place in Miami, it was
Atlanta who reaped the benefit. At the end of study and
prior to ordination, Cicala and his wife moved to Atlanta to
be near their son and within a short time Cicala was ordain
ed to the diaconate in his home parish of St. Oliver Plunkett
in Snellville and began working both for the parish and
Metropolitan Tribunal.
Atlanta is not unique in having a retired civil judge now
serving as a diocesan marriage tribunal judge, but it is still
a relatively new phonomenon nationally, said Father Ed
ward Dillon, who is head of Atlanta’s provincial appeals
court. The archdiocese is benefitting not only from
Cicala’s being a deacon, which enables him to serve as a
single judge deciding annulment cases, but also from his
legal training and judicial experience.
“We got the benefit of the training in Miami. We are also
getting the benefit of his training and experience on the
bench,” Father Dillon said.
In addition, Father Dillon noted, since Cicala is retired he
can work at the Tribunal virtually on a full-time basis,
whereas the majority of permanent deacons still have full
time jobs and are able to work on a more limited basis.
(Continued on Page 12)