Irish America, Race, and Bernadette Devlin’s 1969 American Tour

Throughout the 140-year-long history of Irish nationalist tours of the United States, few episodes can match the energy and emotion generated by Bernadette Devlin’s transatlantic visit in 1969. Moments after her arrival at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York City on August 22, Devlin plunged into a hastily arranged press conference, demonstrating the confidence and charisma that had inspired one senior republican commentator to label her “the greatest envoy Ireland ever sent to America.”¹ From there, she was whisked off on a whirlwind tour of New York City, greeted by adoring crowds “everywhere she goes—whether it’s Gaelic Park, the various Irish ballrooms or at meetings in church or fraternal halls.”² This popular appeal soon extended far beyond Devlin’s ethnic base, leading to private meetings with Mayor John Lindsay and United Nations Secretary-General U Thant, along with appearances on national television programs from Meet the Press to Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show.³

By the end of Devlin’s two-week visit, a number of developments had drained her seemingly inexhaustible spirit. Contending with her relentless schedule of appearances, constant sniping from conservative Irish Americans, and the duplicity of her erstwhile sponsors had sapped Devlin’s spirit and direction, and that of the once-impressive transatlantic campaign. Donning a makeshift disguise, Devlin slipped out of a private event in New Jersey and abandoned plans for further appearances in Boston and Washington, DC to return to Northern Ireland. Given the exhausting and bewildering nature of her tour, Devlin was understandably relieved to return home—even if home was a place that the American media presented as innately chaotic and violent.⁴

According to most subsequent accounts, this dramatic reversal was caused by the racial prejudice displayed by Devlin’s ethnic hosts. Contemporary commentators contrast the Irish leader’s irrepressible support for the American civil rights movement with the reticence, or outright hostility, to the cause among many older ethnics. Early in her tour Devlin weathered reproachful glares and angry departures when she impetuously jumped onstage for a duet version of “We Shall Overcome” with an African-American singer at a Philadelphia rally. In California, she received a clerical admonition to stop talking about controversial matters like socialism and racial equality. Each instance only strengthened Devlin’s will, and by the time that she made it to the Midwestern “Rust Belt,” on the way back from the West Coast, Devlin had become more outspoken, and even confrontational, on racial matters. When the sponsors of a rally in Detroit would not allow young African Americans to enter Ford Hall, Devlin refused to take the stage. In Chicago, she refused to pay tribute to the ruling Daley political machine (which she had criticized in the wake of the violence outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention), and instead visited Jesse Jackson’s controversial Operation Breadbasket program.

The last decade has brought renewed attention to the disillusioning episode of Devlin’s tour. Those scholars who focus on Irish-American racial prejudice speak with increased certainty that race was the primary, if not exclusive, source of the Devlin tour’s problems. This recent work has drawn from two major interpretive developments that emerged during the early 1990s: the “ethnic fade” thesis and the rise of Whiteness Studies, each of which sought to revise the anodyne narrative of Irish America that emerged during the mid-twentieth century. Building on Herbert Gans’s earlier scholarship on symbolic ethnicity during the late 1970s and 1980s, Mary Waters’s Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (1990) offered a sociological deconstruction of European ethnicity in the United States. Focusing largely on Irish America, with more than one hundred references to Irish ethnicity, the primary thrust of this seminal work was Waters’s characterization of European ethnicity as a facile construct, based more on situational convenience rather than historical continuity.⁵ By the end of the decade, anthropologist Reginald Byron revisited this theme of attenuated transatlantic ties, looking at the way in which twentieth-century American experiences reshaped Irish-American identity among later-generation ethnics.⁶

While...