Dr. Norman Francis: A pocketful of miracles

Peter Finney Jr.
Clarion Herald

Dr. Norman C. Francis is 91, which, in the view of St. Paul, probably is a graced time to start thinking about how the race is going.

When Francis retired in 2015 as the president of Xavier University of Louisiana, he was the longest-tenured university CEO in the United States.

Forty-seven years earlier – on April 4, 1968 – Francis, then 37, was waiting in Newark International Airport for a flight home to New Orleans just after having been confirmed by the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament as Xavier’s first lay president.

The sisters had asked him twice before to step up as president, and they finally wore him down. He called home to tell his wife Blanche the exciting news, and his youngest son Patrick answered the phone.

“He said, ‘Daddy, do you know that Dr. King has been shot?’” Francis recalled. “I remember saying, ‘Oh, my God.’ His assassination was like blowing up ‘The Dream.’”

There have been many miracles in Francis’ life – he met his late wife as an undergraduate at Xavier, and they were married for 60 years and had six children – but one that stands out apart from his family legacy is the jewel that Xavier was and has become.

Consider this: When St. Katharine Drexel’s father, Francis Drexel, died in 1885, the high-powered banker left behind a $15.5 million estate that was divided among his three daughters – Elizabeth, Catherine (Katharine’s birth name) and Louise.

About $1.5 million went to several charities, leaving the girls to share in the income produced by $14 million – about $1,000 a day for each woman. In current dollars, the estate would be worth more than $250 million.

Until her death in 1955 at age 96, Mother Katharine spent about $20 million in support of her work, building schools and churches and paying the salaries of teachers in rural schools for Blacks and Native Americans.

Louise Drexel Morell, her younger sister, contributed millions more to similar causes. Elizabeth, the eldest sister, died in 1890 in premature childbirth, one year before Catherine formed the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Negroes, in Bensalem, Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia.

Francis Drexel crafted his will carefully. His daughters controlled the income from the estate, and upon their deaths, the Drexel inheritance would flow to their children. Drexel did this to prevent his unmarried daughters from falling prey to “fortune hunters.”

Neither Elizabeth nor Louise, however, had children, and the will stipulated that if that were to happen, upon his daughters’ deaths, the money would be distributed to several religious orders and charities – the Society of Jesus, the Christian Brothers, the Religious of the Sacred Heart, a Lutheran hospital and others.

Drexel, of course, had no way of knowing that his “Kate” would enter religious life in 1889 and two years later found her order. Thus, after 1955, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament no longer had the Drexel fortune available to support their ministries.

Francis considers Mother Katharine’s longevity, especially in light of a serious heart attack she suffered in 1935, to be a miracle.

“There were any number of miracles that the Lord provided through her, and we’ve always called Xavier a miracle,” said Francis, whose university still sends more African-American graduates to medical school than any other university in the country. “Xavier is a miracle not just for all that it has done but for the mere fact that it has survived and thrived. Under normal circumstances, that shouldn’t 

have been the case. If she had died at the normal age of 70, which at the time would have been a big age, Xavier would have struggled. (But) God allowed her to live until she was 96, and we had that interest available for many more years.”

Francis’ impact on New Orleans will be the subject of an hour-long WYES documentary, “Dr. Norman C. Francis: A Legacy of Leadership,”   which will premiere Sept. 27 at 8 p.m. (also available at wyes.org/live).

The documentary will cover his childhood in Lafayette, where he learned to play checkers in his father Joseph’s barbershop, lessons that still resonate in his life.

“The only rule in my dad’s place was, ‘Don’t cuss in my barbershop,’” Francis said. “He had a checkerboard that he made himself. These young guys, who were porters for the railroad, would come in and teach me how to play checkers. I played what was called ‘freewheeling’ checkers. I had to know what was going to happen in the front of me and to the right and the left of me.

“These guys would turn to my father and say, ‘Joe, he’s crying.’ My daddy would say, ‘Let him cry! Don’t let him win!’ They never let me win. But my learning of checkers had me prepared to make decisions when I was at the university. When I had a tough decision to make, I thought of that checkerboard.”

One of the classic stories of a hard decision occurred early in his tenure at Xavier. Campus protestors called him into a meeting where they handed him a list of 10 demands.

Francis, the first Black graduate of Loyola University New Orleans Law School, looked at the sheet and asked: “Are these negotiable?”

“No,” the student leader said.

Francis closed his briefcase and got up from the table.

“Wait, where are you going?” someone said.

“Well, you said they were non-negotiable. There’s no use  in me staying.”

“No, no, we can talk about it!”

“Well, I started with No. 1 and 2, and I got to No. 6  and I said, ‘None of those are problems; we can do that. The others, we’ll have to talk about.’”

In 1961, when Francis was dean of students, he helped make room at a Xavier dorm for the Freedom Riders – Black students challenging segregated public buses and trains in the Deep South – so they could rest their heads in New Orleans.

He got the OK by going to the Blessed Sacrament sister who ran the university with the story of the Nativity.

“I said, ‘Sister, remember that little baby who was born and his mother had to stay in an animal barn? Well, this is that case,’” Francis said.

One of the things that tickles Francis the most is when he goes to the doctor or to the pharmacy and runs into another Xavier graduate in a white coat.

“I saw a woman at an event at Dillard recently, and she told me she was a doctor and I said, ‘Don’t tell me that, little girl!’”

One of the final miracles of Francis’ life was getting Xavier’s Katrina-battered campus back open four months after the storm.

When former presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush came to Xavier after the disaster to view the damage, Francis made a bet with Clinton that  Xavier would reopen in January. Clinton was being accompanied by Alexis Herman, a Xavier graduate who served under him as secretary of labor.

Clinton seemed shocked at Francis’ self-assured bravado, but Herman gave him the eye.

“You were the president of the United States,” Herman told Clinton, “but he’s the president of Xavier University, where I went to school. Don’t bet against him.”

The WYES documentary will air Sept. 27 at 8 p.m. [email protected]