ABSTRACT

In 1877 an outraged reader wrote to the Boston Pilot protesting editor John Boyle O’Reilly’s attack on the Franklin Typographical Society for refusing membership to an African-American printer. The reader, furious that an Irish-American newspaper would give “sanction to social equality between whites and blacks,” canceled his subscription. O’Reilly responded:

We are sorry that such sentiments should come from one who boasts of belonging to ‘the faithful Irish.’ There is nothing Irish about his principles, and we are glad to receive the ‘stop my PILOT’ of such a man. We glory in the very things he hates-and the Irish people have ever gloried in them. ‘God forbid,’ said Daniel O’Connell, ‘that I should ever receive for the cause of Ireland one shilling wrung from negro slavery!’ And this has ever been the spirit of Ireland and her people at home and abroad. . . . THE PILOT holds that the colored man should stand on a perfect equality with the white man and the Catholic cathedrals of America are as free to the negro as to the Irishman. God forbid that it should be otherwise; or that the PILOT should ever fear to utter such a principle in the face of a petty threat. (5/5/77, 4, emphasis added)1

O’Reilly is remembered for such unequivocal statements in support of equal rights for African Americans. But his response to his angry reader reveals that O’Reilly uses such statements to defi ne Irishness more than to support blacks. He confi dently asserts that Irish Americans, as descendants of the Catholic nationalist tradition of Daniel O’Connell, have always fought against injustice against African Americans. For O’Reilly, the Irish are inherently egalitarian because they are Irish and Catholic. At the same time, his obsessive defense of this supposed natural egalitarianism, here and elsewhere in his journalism, suggests that the reputation of the Irish must constantly be policed against charges of racism.