The following is a transcript of the September 26 Bishop’s Lecture Series featuring Shannen Williams
Thank you so much, Bishop, for that wonderful introduction. And thank you all for being here this evening. It truly is a privilege and an honor to be in community with you as I reflect on what I like to call the story of America’s Real Sister Act. And what I want to do this evening is to really tell this story through the lives and legacies of the three African-American Catholic sisters currently on the road to sainthood within our church, Venerable Mother Mary Lange, who was the Foundress of the Oblate Sisters of Providence in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1828. Venerable Henriette De Lille, Foundress of the Sisters of the Holy Family in New Orleans in 1842, and Servant of God, Sister Thea Bowman, who was a member of the pioneering generation of African-American Catholic Sisters, who began to desegregate the nation’s historically white Roman Catholic sisterhoods after World War II. But in telling that story as a way to illustrate why I argue that Black history is and always has been Catholic history, I want to tell you how I came to this story and to this journey of studying the lives and labors of America’s Black Catholic women, both religious and lay.
Now, although I am Catholic, I knew very little Black Catholic history when I went to graduate school in 2006. In fact, my book really began as an attempt to make sense of a rather extraordinary news article that I stumbled upon in early 2007, while I was enrolled at Rutgers University in a seminar in African-American history. At the time, I was perusing microfilmed editions of Black-owned newspapers in search of a little known dimension of the American past in hopes of being able to impress my professor, who was a pioneer of Black women’s history. And so while I was scanning through a roll of the Pittsburgh Courier, I encountered a 1968 article announcing the formation of a Black Power Federation of Catholic Nuns called the National Black Sisters Conference. The article’s title alone, Black Sisters Way: Contradictions in Christian and Secular Community, immediately piqued my interest. However, it was this accompanying photograph of four smiling Black Catholic sisters who steadied my hand on the microfilm reader that day. Up until that moment, I, a lifelong Catholic, had never seen a Black nun except in a Hollywood film. In fact, the only Black sister that I knew at the time was Sister Mary Clarence, the fictional character played by Whoopy Goldberg in the critically acclaimed Sister Act film franchise.
Deeply ashamed of my ignorance, I soon learned that I was not alone. Even my mother, who had attended Catholic schools for the entirety of her formal education, and who, in 1974, became one of the first three Black women to graduate from the University of Notre Dame, was unaware of the existence of Black nuns in our church. No, only White nuns taught us in our schools, my mother relayed to me on the telephone later that evening. But I wish I had known. I wish we’d had Black nuns in Savannah when I was growing up. Stunned by my mother’s revelation, I set out to learn as much as I could about the National Black Sisters Conference and to understand the roots of the invisibility of Black Sisters in our lives. From Father Cyprian Davis’s landmark study of the US Black Catholic Community, I discovered, among many things, that there had been Black nuns in my mother’s hometown of Savannah, Georgia, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Before anti-Black prejudices and violent threats pushed these consecrated women out, members of two separate all-Black sisterhoods had helped to lay the foundation for and ensure the survival of the city’s Black Catholic educational system.
Their heroic efforts made my mother’s, and by extension, my own journey into Catholicism possible. Yet the white nuns and priests who taught my mother and hundreds of other Black children in Savannah during America’s civil rights and Black power years never once alluded to Black sisters in their lessons. According to my mother, her White instructors did not teach any Black history or art either. And after calling and writing a host of Catholic institutions to drag down some of the sisters and Black Sisters who established the National Black Sisters Conference, I finally began to understand why. The saga of America’s Black women who’ve dared to be poor, chaste, and obedient is largely untold, wrote Sister Mary Shon Copeland in 1975. It is an uneasy story, not only because it is rooted in the American dilemma, racism, but also because the position of a woman in an oppressed group is traditionally delicate and strategic. Now, by the time that I interviewed her, Dr. Copeland was a distinguished professor of theology at Boston College and the first African-American President of the Catholic Theological Society of America. She had also been out of religious life for 13 years. However, in the 1960s and 1970s, Copeland, who was the first African-American Felician sister in Detroit, Michigan, and later an Adrian Dominican sister, had been one of the conference’s most visible leaders.
She had also done more than anyone else to preserve the organization’s memory in the face of marginalization and erasure. In addition to publishing the first scholarly article on the National Black Sisters conference in the early 2000s, Dr. Copeland had also helped to arrange for the deposit of the organization’s papers at Marquette University. I’m so glad you’re interested in the Black Sisters conference, Dr. Copeland expressed to me during our first conversation. We’ve been waiting on someone to tell this story. Now, while Dr. Copeland’s willingness to share her experiences with me proved pivotal, it was Dr. Patricia gray, the conference’s founding President, and one of those four nuns featured on that Pittsburgh courier photograph who radically changed my focus and my book’s focus, routinely described by her women and men peers as one of the most intellectually talented and charismatic Catholic sisters of her generation. Gray, who was known in religious life as Sister M. Martin De Porres, had been the conference’s heart and soul in its formative years. As Pittsburgh’s first Black religious Sister of Mercy and the conference’s leading public voice, gray was also the face and force of what some were calling the new Black Nun.
However, in 1974, Dr. Gray abruptly departed religious life and stopped giving interviews related to the National Black Sisters conference. In fact, in the 1980s, when the producers of Eyes on the Prize were interviewing various civil rights leaders, they tracked her down and she refused. So I was very lucky that she did indeed give me the interview. I don’t like to look back Dr. Gray frequently repeated during the first of our many conversations over the years. However, after I presented her with a recently published book on Catholic Sisters Activism and the Black Freedom Struggle of the 1950s and 1960s, she quickly changed her mind. Visibly frustrated by the book’s erasure of Black Sisters: Vanguard Activism in the Catholic Fight for Racial Justice, In its glaring omissions about the one Black nun briefly discussed in its pages, the 65-year-old ex-nun quietly stood and departed the room. Several minutes later, Dr. Gray returned with a treasure trove, her personal archive from her time and religious life. In handing over the materials, Dr. Gray revealed that in the 1970s, the Conference’s executive board had wanted to publish a book documenting Black Sisters’s history in the United States. She also lamented to me about the enduring invisibility of Black Sisters’s lives and labors in church and wider American history.
Then, in her great wisdom, Dr. Gray gently encouraged me to consider expanding my attention to the mostly unsung and under-research history of the nation’s Black Sisterhood. We, the National Black Sisters Conference, were not the first Black Sisters to revolt in the church, she quietly declared. If you can, try to tell all of our stories. So in my book, I to recover the voices of a group of Black American Church women whose lives, labors, and struggles have been systematically ignored, routinely dismissed as insignificant, and too often reduced to myth. For 13 years, I sought the untold stories of the nation’s Black Catholic sisters, and I must admit, I found no accounts bearing any resemblance to the fabled Hollywood tale of Sister Mary Clarence. I also failed to encounter Black sisters whose lived experiences confirmed many of the existing narratives of American Catholicism or the master story of Catholic sisters in the United States. Instead, from a host of widely ignored archival sources, previously sealed church records, out-of-print books, periodicals, and over 150 oral history interviews, I bore witness to a profoundly unfamiliar history that disrupts and revises much as what has been said about the US Catholic Church and the place of Black people within it.
Because it is it possible to narrate Black Sister’s journey in the United States accurately and honestly without confronting the churches largely unacknowledged and unreconciled histories of colonialism, slavery, and segregation, I address these systems of power and exploitation and their perpetrators, male and female, directly. And in doing so, I recover an overlooked chapter in the history of the long African-American freedom struggle, a tradition of sustained Black Catholic resistance to white supremacy and exclusion that most scholars argue does not exist. When confronted with the silenced past, the greatest responsibility of the historian, and the most radical thing any person can do, is to tell the story that was never meant to be told. My book then marks a new starting point in the history of historical truth-telling in the Catholic Church and wider American society. For far too long, scholars of the American Catholic and Black past have unconsciously or consciously declared, by virtue of misrepresentation, marginalization, and outright erasure, that the history of Black Catholic nuns does not matter. And offering the first full survey of Black sisters’ lives and struggles in the United States, I argued that their history does matter and has always mattered.
Indeed, there is no way to tell the story of Black Catholic sisters without confronting the reality that the origins of American Catholicism lie in slavery, that early African-American history is Catholic history, and most of early American Catholic history is indeed African-American history. When we look at the history of Black female religious life in the United States, we also recognize that it is connected to the history of the larger Atlantic world. Indeed, the nations and the modern world’s first communities, freely open to African-descended women, are founded in Baltimore, Maryland, and New Orleans, Louisiana. Indeed, the craddles of American Catholicism are in the American South, in Florida, in Maryland, in Kentucky, and Louisiana. In the history of the United States, we know that there have been at least eight historically Black Roman Catholic sisterhoods founded. All were founded in the craddles of American Catholicism, and all but one were or were slated to be teaching community communities. What is also significant about the history of these communities is that they were always multi-ethnic communities. Because anti-Black admissions policies also barred Black women from communities in Canada, Latin America, and the Caribbean as well, the historically Black communities in the United States did, in fact, preserve the vocations of these women, meaning that they were always multilingual and would do so well until the 21st century.
What is also significant when we think about the history of Black Catholic Sisters in the United States is that it indeed represents a miracle. Of the 12.5 million Africans who were taken and brought into the Americas as a result of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the vast majority of them went to Brazil, which had until the middle of the 20th century, the largest Black Catholic population in the world. Yet Brazil would not get its first Roman Catholic sisterhood freely open to African-descended women and girls until 1928. It’s almost a century after the Oblate Sisters of Providence are founded in Baltimore, Maryland. So the formation of these communities in the United States makes possible the growth and development of Black female religious life in the Atlantic world. But again, they also remind us that Black women are going to be at the foundations of American Catholicism wherever we look. Indeed, if we recall that the nation’s oldest city and the first enslaved Africans who arrive in what is now the United States are not in Virginia, but rather in St Augustine, Florida. Remember that slavery begins under Catholic auspices in the land territory that becomes the United States in St Augustine in 1565.
And also remember that this is also the site of the first Christian marriage that takes place within what becomes the United States. And the first Christian marriage is an interracial marriage. It’s a Catholic marriage, and it’s between a free Black woman from Seville, Spain, named Louisa de Abrega, and a Spanish conquistador named named Miguel Rodriguez. Indeed, one of the oldest Black Catholic communities in the nation is also along is located in the same place where the oldest community of Catholic is in the nation. And the oldest records of Black Catholic and Black history in the nation are in the diocese of St Augustine. Indeed, it is a free Black Catholic woman that inaugurates Christian marriage in what becomes the United States, and those records are still in the diocese of St. Augustine. Although the formation of Black sisterhoods made possible the entries of Black women into religious life in the United States, it’s important to remember that the first known Black women who professed vows in the United States were not the first Black women to seek entry into religious life. There are plenty of lost vocations long before the Oblate Sisters of Providence are founded in Baltimore in 1828.
We, in fact, know that one of the earliest references to Black women seeking to go into religious life can be found in the records of the Society Society of the Sacred Heart, founded by Saint Rose Philippine de Chine. Her branch of the Society of the Sacred Heart, which is the first community of sisters founded in the state of Missouri, receives a request from the Bishop of Louisiana and the two Floridas in 1819, noting that there were several women of color in Louisiana who were seeking admission into religious life and asking her to consider admitting these women. Although ultimately she does not do so, the paper record gives us great insight into the earliest church and the opinions and racial attitudes of the earliest bishops and priests. For his part, the Bishop of the Louisiana and to Florida’s, Bishop William Duborg, who is also an enslaver, advised Dushan to only consider women of mixed racial heritage, and even then noted that they should, quote, only be admitted to a subalterned profession with a different habit than the Converse sisters, meaning that they would be ranked at the lowest rank within the community. Community. For her part, Deschamps’s superior Sophie Burat, who was the founder of the Sacred Heart in France, made the point to say that if you do admit her, there will be consequences, writing, Do not make the foolish mistake of mixing the Whites with the Blacks.
You will have no more pupils. The same for your novices. No one would join if you were to receive Black novices. We will see what we can do for them later. Now, this community that would come to own over 150 enslaved men, women, and children, continued to receive requests from African-American women to enter the community, but would not admit their first member until after World War II, and they admit her in New York City after that young woman desegregates their college in New York City. But we do know who some of these lost vocations are. At least one of the women enslaved by the community, Eliza Nesbit, was one of the lost vocations. The Archives of the Society of the Sacred Heart do reveal that she repeatedly asked to enter the community and was never allowed to do so. However, she always served in the community schools. She was, in fact, a mother of Black Catholics. We know that, in fact, she was allowed to take an unofficial bow with the community for the rest of her life. She did ask to be buried with the Sisters, and she is buried with the Sisters in Louisiana.
We also know that in her deathbed, several members of the historically Black and Creole Sisters of the Holy Family, did come and care for her on her deathbed because she had been one of their teachers in Louisiana. We also know that women who were owned by the Society of the Sacred Heart in Louisiana, cooked for the Sisters, performed critical labor for the Sisters, but also ensured the financial success of the Sisters, but also found themselves subjected to abuse by the Sisters as the correspondence of their founderous reveals at multiple times in various edited collections. This is Venerable Mother Mary Lange, the Founders of the Oblate Sisters of Providence. The Oblate Sisters of Providence, like the Sisters of the Holy Family in New Orleans, are born of the Haitian Revolution. As free and enslaved refugees flood into the American port cities during the violence of the Haitian Revolution, which cements the foundation of abolitionism throughout the Americas, the church and the nation at large is faced with a humanitarian crisis. In particular, most of these refugees were Catholic, and yet they found themselves cut off from the resources of their church. In response, free women of African descent who were French-speaking decided to found their own schools in order to serve that population.
They do receive the help from a small handful of priests within the church, Church, one in particular, Father James Jobair, and in fact, is assigned by his Sulpetian community to serve the largely abandoned and neglected Afro-Hatian population in Baltimore, Maryland. During this time, as he’s contemplating founding a school, he learns that there are already women of color, Catholic, who are operating a school, and he learns from meeting them that they also have a call to religious life. And he learns, and writes in his diary after he met them, that for more than 10 years, they had wished to consecrate themselves to God for this good work, waiting patiently, then in his own infinite goodness, he would show them a way of giving themselves to him. So for 10 years, they had operated the school, but also experienced rejection from the European Communities of Sisters, ministering in the diocese of Baltimore, which is the nation’s first Catholic diocese. Now, he does not say which communities rejected the founding members of the Oblate Sisters of Providence, but only three communities preceded them in the diocese of Baltimore. They are the Carmelites of Baltimore, they are the daughters of charity, and they are the visitors of the Visitation Sisters in Washington, DC, the daughters of charity founded by St.
Elizabeth Seedon. What we also know is that those communities are all slaveholding communities, and the Oblate Sisters of Providence are not a slaveholding community. And certainly, we also know that not only are they slaveholding communities, but they also have enslaved women who cook for the Sisters and perform critical labor for the Sisters, and also accept the labor of enslaved people as tuition at their schools, unlike the Oblate Sisters of Providence. So they find it best to found their own community to make sure that those sisters can pursue their vocations. And Father James Jober in his diary, documents the great resistance that his endeavor encounters in the diocese. He writes, I knew already that many people who had approved of the idea of a school for pupils disapproved very strongly that of forming a religious house and could not think of the idea of seeing these poor girls, colored girls, wearing the religious habit and constituting a religious community. In fact, he faces so much resistance and in fact, violence that he himself, who was a former soldier, has to repeatedly arm himself and protect the sisters at their convent. Despite that opposition, they will succeed and persevere.
They are also the first non-slaveholding community in the diocese of Baltimore. And they are also the first American US sisterhood to reject the racist and sexist notion that a woman born into slavery lack the virtue necessary to enter religious life. The Oblate Sisters of Providence never have any bars on admission into their community or into their schools. We know that many German immigrant parents entrust the Oblate Sisters of Providence with the education of their children in the 19th century. And even before the US Civil War and the federal abolition of slavery, this community will admit at least eight women born into slavery into their ranks, and one who was still enslaved and was able to gain her freedom before she professed vows. Among these eight who were born into slavery who became early oblate sisters of Providence is Ellen Joseph, who became Sister Mary West. This is a photograph of her here. With all of the sisters who were born into slavery, the community does also preserve the records of their manumission. In the case of Sister Mary West, she was also one of the most famous Catholic sisters of the 19th century and early 20th century, because at the turn of the 20th century, she is believed to be the oldest Catholic sister in the United States.
So the New York Times and the Washington Post ran lots of stories on her, so we have quite a bit of information about her. And also, many of these women are products of the realities of sexual abuse of Black women under slavery, and many of them would be freed by their fathers and allowed to go into religious life. Another early member of the Oblate Sisters of Providence was a woman named Anne-Marie Beecraft, who became Sister Mary Aloysia Beecraft. You may know her name because it has been resurrected as a part of Georgetown University’s efforts to make reparation for its slaveholding past. As Georgetown renamed several buildings on campus for African-Americans who were prominent in the Georgetown community during the period of enslavement, to rename a Hall that had been named after the priest who were involved in an infamous cell. They decided to rename one of the Halls after Anne-Marie Beecraft, unknowing at the time that she also became an oblate sister of providence. What’s significant about Bicraft is, in fact, that she was a 15-year-old girl in Georgetown and founded the nation’s first Catholic school for Black girls in Georgetown. What’s also significant about her, because her name appears in the first national report ever published in the United States for education.
She was known specifically because her father and her mother were prominent Black Catholics. In particular, she was known for her beauty, her piety, but also because her father, William B. Kraft, indeed, was, according to the historical record, the natural born son of Charles Carroll of Carrollton. Charles Carroll of Carrollton is the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence. He is cousin to Bishop John Carroll. He is also one of Maryland’s largest enslavers and an early benefactor of the church. She is the only Catholic sister who we know who has a literal blood right to the early church and to the early nation, and that comes through Charles Carroll of Carrollton. This will also be true for many of the nation’s earliest Black sisters who enter religious life in Louisiana. Many of them have both European and African ancestry, such as the case of Venerable Henriette de Lille, who was the founder of the Sisters of the Holy Family. What’s significant about the Sisters of the Holy Family is that although they are not the first Catholic sisterhood to minister in the state of Louisiana, they are the first to be founded in the state of Louisiana.
They themselves are a community of mixed women, Creole heritage of elite backgrounds. In the case of Venerable Henriette de Lille, she is the great granddaughter of Claude de Bruyé, who is the inaugural French rural engineer, whose crews of free and enslaved men built the first roads levies, canals in New Orleans, and they also built the old Ursula Convent in New Orleans, which, ironically, Henriette de Lille would never be able to enter due to her African heritage and her unwillingness to pass for white. And indeed, we know that many of their earliest sisters also come from elite families. In their first history, they tell us that all the first sisters were of the very first families of the city, and only one, Sister Suzanne Navar, was a stranger from Boston. As for rest, they were all natives of this state, but their fathers were all foreigners, some French, Spanish, and German. They were descendant of the first settlers of Louisiana. Indeed, one of their earliest sisters is a member of a prominent Spanish Catholic family that surveyed much of early Louisiana and Florida. They themselves will also face profound resistance to their presence in the diocese of New Orleans, in the diocese, later Archdiocese of New Orleans.
In fact, unlike Like their counterparts in Baltimore, they were not allowed to wear religious habits for the first 40 or 50 years of their existence. Their first historian tells us, We had a very hard time, for we had many enemies who wanted to degrade our dear little community as poor as we were. We were persecuted by the Sisters of St. Joseph in this city. They tried all they could to make us take off our habits. That was after 45 or 50 years that we had worked and suffered to have a religious habit. No one would think we were anything if we were not dressed in the Holy Habit. In this particular case, the Sisters of St. Joseph, who arrived in New Orleans in 1866, long after the foundation of the Holy Family Sisters, they believe that when the Sisters finally won the right to wear habits, that the Holy Family habit was too close to that of their lay sisters, and they wanted to ensure that the Black Sisters were recognized as the lowest ranked Sisters in the city, despite the fact that they were the first organized in Louisiana, so they are forced to change their habit.
If you’ll notice their first habit, the sisters, the cuff covers their faces, and this is a way to ensure that they would not be molested on the streets, so it would cover their faces. So when people walk by them, you wouldn’t necessarily know if they were Black or White as a way to protect the sisters. Despite the opposition that they face, they will survive. Now, unlike the Oblate Sisters of Providence, the Sisters of the Holy Family began as a Creole community, and it would only admit Creole women who were lighter skinned and of elite background. The community initially rejects the opportunities to admit formerly enslaved women into their communities. And when they finally do so in 1869, the community splits over color discrimination. It will take almost 13 years for the community to come back together. However, when they do and apologize in an attempt to make reparation for what they had done, they begin by buying up properties in the city of New Orleans. They buy a former slave trader’s pen and turn it into one of their earliest schools. They also buy the former quadrant ballroom, which is where women of their color and caste would have been expected to enter into common law marriages with European men, a practice that those women saw as a form of slavery and exploitation, which is why they never wanted to go into that life and instead wanted to dedicate themselves to God.
Indeed, this photograph here is taken at their former mother house at 717 Orleans Street, one of the few black-owned properties at the time in New Orleans’s French Quarter. And so they bought this place specifically because they described it as a den of sin, and they wanted to expiate the sins of slavery there, turning it into their mother house in their academy, St. Mary’s Academy, which is the second oldest black Catholic school in the United States. The first is St. Francis Academy, which is still open, operated by the Oblate Sisters of Providence in Baltimore. I do want to briefly draw your attention to this one sister. Her name is Mary Ursula Wallace, born Elizabeth Wallace. She was a former a member of the Holy Family Sisters and is largely credited with making sure that the community ended its color bar and admitted its first formerly enslaved member. After she does this, she is actually pushed out of the community. She eventually joins the Oblate Sisters of Providence and remains in that community until her death in 1930. I also briefly want to mention the third African-American sisterhood that is still with us, the Franciscan Handmades of the Most Pure Heart of Mary, founded in Savannah, Georgia, in and later relocated to New York City in Harlem in 1923.
Their founderess is not under consideration of canonization, but there might be a case for her at some point. This is the only Catholic sisterhood that we know that was organized, specifically in direct response to a Jim Crow law. In 1915, a law was introduced in the Georgia State Legislature, which would have barred black teachers from teaching white children and white teachers from teaching black children. And had it passed, it would have effectively barred black children from the Catholic educational system him in Savannah because there were no black nuns in Savannah at the time. In response, a white priest who was ministering in Savannah, Georgia, decided to go across the country in hopes of finding a pious laywoman who would, in fact, be able to found a community so that he could circumvent the law. He eventually learns of Eliza Barber-Williams, who was working as a domestic for the Sisters of Notre Dame in Washington, DC, at their Trinity College, now Trinity Washington University, and learned that she had been a former nun in a failed community and convent Louisiana, and had spent some time as an oblate sister of providence. According to his diary that is in the diocese of Savannah, he explained to her what the situation was in Savannah.
She leaves the room, comes back with her life savings, and tells him that she will be in Savannah within six months. She is there within six months, and she has recruited several women into the community within a year. What I will say, and what you’ll notice about her habit, her habit is very similar to the habit of the oblate sister’s of Providence, their 20th century habit. And that’s because she never gives back her oblate habit. So it’s why they look the same. They’re actually the same habit for people who… Some people were oftentimes confused. It’s because she was a former oblate. There are very little information about these sisters. However, the Black press did a great job of documenting early Black Catholic history, and the African-American owned Savannah Tribune, in fact, does document their first profession ceremony, giving us a clear sense of where these women are coming from what their names were and what their names and religion were. They will eventually be pushed out of Savannah, Georgia, again, and will settle in Harlem, New York. I do also want to mention the only contemplative order of Black nuns that existed in the United States, and they were the Colored Magdalens.
If a Black woman wanted to pursue a contemplative vocation as opposed to an apostolic vocation prior to 1922, the only way that she could do so is if she left the United States and hopefully got into a European community that would accept her, or she needed to be able to pass for white or simply non-black. And I’ll explain why in just a second. Not until 1922 was a segregated unit of the Magdalens in Baltimore, Maryland, created to allow black women who wanted to go into religious life to be able to do so. There are only two images of the Magdalens that exist that anyone ever has. They’re here from 1947 and 1952. And the last Magdalene died in 2022. In the 1960s, the community integrated with the Good Shepherd Sisters, and one Magdalene was still alive until 2022. So I can’t identify most of the women in this image, but only because of the one Magdalene who was still alive until 2022. Her name was Sister Nelly Hawkins. Beyond the formation of Black Sisterhoods, I do want to mention that there were examples of African-descended women who did go into European and historically White communities in the United States and beyond prior to desegregation in World War II.
In some cases, these women actually founded communities and passed for white. Now, some European communities would accept African-descended women if they could pass for something something else. Because European and white American communities would take Native American women. They would take Latina women. They would take women of Asian descent. So a black woman who wanted to enter into a European community or a white American community could do so if she could pass as something else. And so we do have those examples. But if those women did so, they oftentimes had to cut ties with their black family members. They could not visit them. They had to completely cut that part of their life away. In one perhaps notable case, the Sister Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the IHM Sisters, one of the largest and most distinguished communities of Catholic Sister educators in the nation, were founded by two former oblate Sisters of Providence who could pass for white. In 1845, the oblate Sisters of Providence run into their first crisis when their French superior, Father James Jober dies, and the Archbishop of Baltimore tries to suppress the community, telling the Sisters that there was no place for Black nuns in his diocese and that they should go be maids.
They are saved when a Belgian priest prostrates himself before the bishop and begs for the community to survive. But in the moment of crisis, two members decide to leave, and they decide to go found a community which becomes the first community of sisters established in in the state of Michigan. They are founded by Mother Teresa Maxis-Duchemin, who was also a founder of the Obelates, and then becomes the founder of the IHM Sisters. Her community grows fairly quickly, and they expand into Western Pennsylvania, and eventually into Eastern Pennsylvania. Founding three universities. But Mother Teresa is also high… She’s very independent, and she oftentimes bumps head with the bishops who do know her secret. And so we know from their own correspondence that they oftentimes refer her in racially derogatory ways, with two bishops writing in 1859 as she was expanding into Pennsylvania. I tremble when I think of the impression which we made when our good people discovered that their daughters had been sent to be placed under a mulatto superior. I do not think we are yet ripe for such an anomaly. In order to save her community, she is exiled to the Gray Nuns of Ottawa until she’s very old in 1892, is allowed to come back into the United States and dies.
Afterwards, the community community colludes with one another to erase their African-American heritage, saying that their founders was in fact the third member of the community and not the two oblate sisters of providence, and they closed their archives off so that no one would find out about their African-American origins. In 1928, in fact, one superior, after a priest attempts to access their archives, writes, We are convinced that silence is the fairest, why is this the most agreeable way of committing to oblivion this subject, and that is their African-American heritage. Image. Not until 1992 did the community formally apologize and adopt an antiracist platform in Plank, and among many things, they opened up their records so that people could see what they had done. One thing that I do want to draw your attention to here, this is the only image that exists of Mother Teresa Max’s Dutcherman. However, even if you today, if you go to an IHM website or the websites of their universities, you will not see this image. You instead see an engraving based on this image. It’s because this image itself is, in fact, a subversive image, in part because if you know the habits of the IHM sisters, this photograph, which is taken in the late 1850s, she’s not wearing the habit of the community that she founds.
This is the habit of the Great Nuns of Ottawa. The photo was taken while she’s in exile. It’s the only image that they have of their founders, but they don’t use the image because it still documents that painful history. You’ll see is an engraving based on this photograph, but they transpose the IHM habit on her. But this is the original photograph. There are other examples as well. The Sisters of Charity of New York, one of their earliest superiors was an African descended woman. This is Margaret Whiteman. She was Mother Mary Rosina, and she served as a superior of the community from 1891 to 1894. She enters into the community before the federal abolition of slavery, and we know that she was born to either a free or enslaved a Black mother and a British planter father. In their history, she is described as the most hidden of the mother’s general, and that is because after her death, one of her successors went into the archive and attempted to destroy everything related to her except her prayer book and her rosary. When I began my research, the Sisters of Charity of New York invited me to their mother house, and they sat me in a room and told me the story of what they had known, but they said that that is true.
Someone did try to destroy much of her material, but not everything was destroyed. There had been oral histories of Sisters taken that had known her that were in the archive. And a photograph also survived, which is this photograph. Black women who could not pass for white but entered white communities in the 19th century all had to leave the United States like their male counterparts who were wanting to go into the priesthood. They all went to European communities, but they were only admitted to allowed to become lay sisters who were relegated to domestic service within their communities. This is Frederica Lough, Savannah, Georgia, who entered into the novitia of the Missionary Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate Conception in Rome in 1880. She becomes ill and dies, but she’s allowed to profess her bow as Sister Benedict of the Angels is buried in Italy and buried in Rome. This is Frances Johnson of Baltimore, who enters into the Franciscan Sisters of Mill Hill in London. She becomes Sister Xavier. She’s allowed to return to the United States and labors until her death in Baltimore in 1894. In this community that ministers exclusively in the African-American community would not take another African-American sister until the 1960s.
They directed all of their other applicants to the Obelay Sisters of Providence. This is Mother Matilde Beesley, who is both of African-American and Native American descent, who founds the first community of Black sisters in Savannah, Georgia. She goes to York, England, to enter into a Franciscan novice, or a Portclair novices, we believe, and comes back and founds her own community. Her story is also significant because her attempt to enter into the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, founded by Saint Katherine Drexel, attempting to merge her community when her community begins to falter, precipitates the anti-African-American and anti-Native American admissions policies of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament. We know in their annals that she is just Mother Katherine, and the Sisters describe Mother Matilda as a very saintly colored woman, but they say that the White Sisters will not live with her on equal terms, and therefore, they will not accept African-Americans or Native Americans. The first US provincial, the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth, also accepted early Black members, but specifically only young women that she adopted. Oftentimes, when white Catholic women gave birth to African-American children, they put them in Catholic orphanages.
They were oftentimes then sent to the Black Sisters because most white sisters would not raise African-American orphans. In her case, we know that she adopts at least six African-American girls who were born to white mothers, and three of those girls became members of the community, the first of which was Sister Maryanne Charleston, who entered the community in 1889. Now, she is forced to go and minister in Poland, in France, and Italy, but the other members are allowed to minister in the United States. So In that particular instance, when we look at the history of Black sisters, especially those who could pass for white, even though we do have these notable examples in the 19th and early 20th century, most Black women who could pass for white decided to go into the Black communities. And we have the documentation of why these women did it. In part, many of them never wanted to be separated from the African-American community. And they also say that they would never cut ties with their African-American family members because they would oftentimes be required to do so. One One example involves Rebecca Clifford. She was the valedictorian of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament Boarding Academy, St.
Francis de Sales in Rock Castle, Virginia. She was given the opportunity to enter a white community in Philadelphia on the condition that she passed her white and not allow her Black mother to visit her at the convent. And instead, she says no, and she joins the Obelate Sisters of Providence and becomes one of their most distinguished superiors. What’s significant is that we actually know why she did it in a letter. She reportedly stated, That I should not have my mother visit me, I think, positively wrong and not the will of God. My mother is making a great sacrifice in giving up her only daughter to God. She is doing it most willingly. Should I impose an unnecessary sacrifice upon her? My decision in this is that the white people have many to work for them, but the colored people have very few. They are my own people, and I think God wants me to give them in the first place, and I don’t think that I would be blessed if I were to do otherwise. One of the earliest Mary Knowles sisters in New York will also make a similar stand. This is Elsy St.
Claire Davis, who became Sister Mary Francis Davis. She was the 14th Mary Knowles sister, and she was the congregation’s first treasurer and among the second group of sisters to be sent to minister in China. Now, what we know is that she is born to two African-American parents who are listed in the census as mixed race. We know that her biological father dies, her mother remarries, has another child, and then her mother dies. She enters from the diocese of Brooklyn, and she tells the sisters at the very beginning about her racial heritage, and she tells them in their annals that she will not be separated from her stepfather or her half-sister who she describes as Black, and using that term in 1914. And so the community takes a vote, and the sisters were very impressed that she would not be separated from her Black counterparts, her Black family members. There are other women, though, who are seeking to hide. And this is dangerous work because if you were caught passing for White in a White community, you could be removed. Other things could happen. In one particular case that I was able to become aware of, a Black woman who was Creole was caught passing for white in the Religious Sisters of Mercy in St.
Louis, Missouri, in 1929, and is dismissed from the community. Now, she comes from a very prominent family. Her father was very wealthy. Her father can pass for white, but most people knew that he was black because he took care of his African-American mother. Her father was very rich. He had a cigar factory, and so that protected the family. After the father’s death, all the family members began migrating out of Alabama, and she herself, and most of them go to California where they pass for white. But in this particular case, she goes to Missouri. In this case, someone Someone writes the superior in Maryland. Someone from Mobile writes the superior in Maryland to go tell the superior in St. Louis that they have a Creole in the community. It says, Yesterday, Sister M. Dominica received a letter from the former Mobile mother house stating that a mistle beer from Mobile has been accepted into the St. Louis novice. I am sure you do not know that this young lady is Creole, and everyone in Mobile knows it. Her grandmother was of pure Negro blood and black in color. She was a student at the Providence Infirmary Training School, and at the time of her graduation, the feeling was so intense that she should not be given her diploma in public.
I hope she is not already in the Novitiat because I could not allow her to remain. So they do remove her. However, it is clear that the superior in St. Louis knew that ahead of time because she enters into the Visitation Sisters in Richmond, Virginia. The superior in Richmond writes back saying, She’s doing wonderful. What’s the problem? And the St. Louis says, There’s no problem with her and never reveals her. And so she’s allowed to stay into this community until her death in 1963 without anyone knowing. However, I did track her down, eventually told the family as well, and the family gave me the photo because they were very happy to know about that history that had been lost. There are other examples as well. Most Black women, though, whether they could pass for white or not, would not be admitted into white or European communities. And so they would be directed from places places like Texas, Washington State, Cuba, other parts of Latin America, Canada, et cetera, and travel hundreds, if not thousands of miles away from their hometowns to be able to enter communities willing to accept them. This is Mary Louena Glenn, who is the first graduate of the Historically Black, blessed St.
Peter Claver School in San Antonio, Texas, to enter religious life. She has to leave San Antonio to enter the Obelations of Providence in Baltimore. This is Innocent Chinoworth, who is from Rock Island, Illinois, who experiences a series of rejections before she learns of the existence of the African-American orders. One thing that I do want to mention about her case is that she’s born to a German-American mother and an African-American father. After she experiences this rejection by the BVM sisters who had educated her and also Katherine Drexel, her mother, after the death of her father, works as a lay assistant only in the nation’s Black Catholic schools. And what we know is that because of what happened to her daughter, anytime a Black girl was rejected at Mission a white community, her mother would always direct the girls to the Oblate Sisters of Providence. For those who go into religious life, though, they’re not going to be able to integrate communities well until after 1947. And if they don’t remain in the community, their records are closed to researchers. So sometimes the only thing that we have is a newspaper article and a photograph, such as the case of Mary Dolores Allen, who was of St.
Louis, Missouri, who was the first Holy Ghost Sister in Techni, Illinois. She didn’t remain in the community. And so when I interviewed their first and only African-American member to remain, she told me she was the first to be admitted. And I told her, actually, you weren’t. You were actually the second or the third. But she didn’t know it because they didn’t stay, and the sisters never told her. In other instances, women who pass for white in communities are instructed to pass for white in their communities. This is Sister Lorraine Holly. She is the first school sister of St. Francis. She’s from Colorado Springs, Colorado. Now, she entered the community not wanting to pass, but it was instructed to her that she would be forced to pass for white in her community. And so even though she taught in black schools, she was never allowed to tell her Black students that she was Black. She does not reveal herself until the 1970s in Chicago when integration comes to the church and the nation as a whole. Another sister who also entered into the School Sisters of St. Francis, Sandra Smithson. She also was forced to pass for a white in the community.
However, she does reveal herself to her students, and for punishment, she is then sent to Latin America and told to pass as a non-Black Latina sister. So they could be punished for, in fact, being truthful about their racial heritage. But most Black people who go into religious life generally go to the Black orders. Up to 75% of the 2,500 Black women who we know went into religious life, most of them became members of the Black sisterhoods. In many cases, African-American Catholic families send many of their children into religious life. These are the famous Wades. This is Francis Wade, who was the first African-American SVD priest, who had two sisters who became oblate sisters of providence. He had several aunts who were oblate sisters of providence. This family was born into slavery owned by the Jesuits in Maryland. There’s actually an Uncle Gonzaga Wade, just to know how despite the fact that they were enslaved by the church, they remained Catholic. Other families, the Birks of Kentucky, who were coming out of the Holy Land of Kentucky, send five of their daughters to religious life. One becomes sick and then comes back to Kentucky, but the rest remain in religious life until their death, the last Burke sister died just a few years ago.
These are the famous Thomas sisters of Akron, Ohio, by way of Lebanon, Kentucky. Three of the sisters become handmaids in Harlem. And the youngest sister, Josephine, desegregates a white community in Cleveland, Ohio. They can trace their lineage to enslave people owned by the Spaulding family in Kentucky. In particular, their great great grandmother was so famous that at her funeral, it’s reported in both the Catholic and white-owned newspapers about her piety and her charity to the community, regardless of race. Other stories also connect Black sisters to the larger community in struggle. There are sisters who had family members who were lynched in the United States. One case involves Wayne Manzilla, Dr. Wayne Manzilla, who was a famous professor at Langston College in Oklahoma. After he is lynched, the insurance company refuses to pay out the death benefit, pushing the family into abject poverty. His wife suffers a nervous breakdown from which she is never able to recover. And no one will take pity on the family except a white priest police in Oklahoma. He goes to the family and he begs the white sisters in Oklahoma to take the children, and they refuse to do so because they’re Black.
And so instead, he takes them all the way to Kansas, where the Oblate Sisters of Providence have orphanages where the children are saved. And one of the children, Sister Felix, becomes an Oblate Sister of Providence and dies as an oblate sister of providence. And what’s notable is that in her file, there are the legal cases because the family kept suing the insurance company for decades after in hopes that they would get some form of justice, but they never did. What’s also very significant is that they were not a Catholic family, but they all become Catholic after they are saved by this priest. And in her journal, she continues to remark upon this priest who saved her. She recounts the journey of him taking them from Oklahoma to Kansas to the Oblate Sisters of Providence. There are other examples as well in the Annals of the Black Orders. They take in survivors the Tulsa Massacre. We know that many of them make their way to St. Louis, and it’s remarked there. Members of the Black Orders are also oftentimes desegregating Catholic universities long before the Brown decision. One example that I want to mention, of course, are that the fact that the Oblate Sisters of Providence are, in fact, the first Black students at St.
Louis University in St. Louis, a Jesuit institution. We have always thought that the first Black students come in 1944, but we know that the The Late Sisters of Providence are there in 1927, with the first African-American graduate being Sister Mary Lou Richard Short, writing her thesis on James Walden Johnson, and also making the point of building curricula through their dissertations and their bachelor’s thesis and their master’s thesis on how they were going to incorporate Negro history into their lessons in their schools. In fact, we know that Black sisters were the first Catholic to teach Black history within Catholic boundaries. We also, in their records, can document the leadership of lay women at every turn within the church. In particular, here is one lay woman, Annie Bates, who was a lay woman from the Caribbean who founded one of the first Black Catholic parishes in Detroit. And when she found this church, she is able to get the Obelate Sisters of Providence to come in. So anytime that you see images from Our Lady of victory Church, notice that the Obelate Sisters of Providence always give Mother Anna Bates the seat of honor because she is the mother of the church.
I want to end specifically giving us examples of those Black sisters who desegregated White communities, again, to embody the spirit and legacy of Sister Thea Bowman. The earliest generations of Black women who desegregated White communities oftentimes faced difficult challenges. Some of them were, in fact, only admitted on a segregated basis. These are the first Sisters of St. Mary, now the Franciscan Sisters of Mary in St. Louis, Missouri. They accept five Black women in 1946, three in June, and then two more later that year. They are segregated in housing, dining, and socializing rising. They build a separate novitiet for the Black members. The first Black members cannot enter into the mother house, and when they are finally allowed to enter into the mother house, they must also enter through the back doors, never through the front doors. They are even among a small handful of Black sisters that we know were forced to profess their vows in a segregated ceremony, and we actually have a photograph of it, so that they could not profess their vows. In some cases, young women had to profess their vows in the rectory or somewhere else on the day of profession, so as to not offend the white parents, or at least that was what was told to them.
But if you’ll notice this, one thing that I want to draw your attention to are these black nuns that are seated. These are Oblate sisters of Providence. Any time that a black girl was able to desegrate a white community in the United States, the Oblate Sisters of Providence generally sent representatives. Oftentimes, these young women had been educated by the Oblate Sisters of Providence, or at the very least, they always wanted someone to know that they would be there for them and in part because many of the members of the Black Orders had not been educated by Black nuns. Rather, they had been educated by White nuns and then rejected admission into the communities of their educators. And so when young women were finally able to break that bar, they always wanted to be there to bear witness and to offer support. And so when we think about this particular episode, one thing that I want to draw your attention to is the extraordinary lens that communities went to keep Black women and girls out of their ranks. By opening up archives, we can see very clearly the lens that they went, and it also confirms the testimonies of Black sisters.
After World War II, we see increasing pressure from advocates for integration in the Catholic Church, beginning to put pressure on white communities to open their ranks. Oftentimes, it’s coming from white priests who minister in African-American communities. So these are the general council minutes of the Religious Sisters of Mercy. Once they begin to approach and begin to receive increasing numbers of applications into their ranks. Mother provincial of the province of Chicago, Mother M. Genevieve Crane, reported that she is being faced with the problem of accepting colored girls as postulents. Mother understands that a priest is sending in an application for two colored girls to enter the no viset. The problem was discussed by the general counsel, but no action was taken. Mother asked the members of the general counsel to give it serious thought and fervent prayer. What we know is that individual priests write to sisters because oftentimes they do not want the girls who are seeking to go into religious life to experience the pain of rejection, and so the priests write themselves. This is Father John F. O’brien, who is the pastor of Harlem’s Church of the Resurrection, who sends a letter to all the superiors in the Archdiocese of New York and in 1946, basically sending a letter of general inquiry, but finally getting to his point in the second paragraph.
Is the order Catholic enough to accept colored vocations? I’m in a colored parish, and I’m immediately concerned with this information. And the response that he will get back is, No, no, no. The Religion Sisters of Mercy gets so many applications that they write to the Vatican to ask for help. Enclosed is a copy of a letter that I’ve received from one of our mother’s provincial relative to the acceptance of colored girls to our institute. The problem is forced upon us because of the number of colored students we now teach in our schools. Even though the training of colored subjects would necessarily differ in some respect from the training of other subjects, the colored would no doubt resent a separate noviceit. It seems, too, that at this time, the Sisters in general would not welcome colored subjects into our present noviceit. The Religion Sisters of Mercy get so many applicants in Chicago that they think about even building and Creating a Separate Negro province in Chicago. That’s how many that they’re getting. But this letter is important for several reasons. One, it tells us that Black women and girls were considered problems before they ever stepped foot inside the convent, meaning that they were never given the chance.
Two, it is an understanding that they said that in general, the sisters would not welcome color subjects into our present novitian, meaning that anti-Blackness was not seen as a disqualifying factor for white women in religious life. But also three, the problem is forced upon us because of the number of colored students we now teach in our schools. And so the reality is it reminds us that just because you teach black children does not signify a commitment to racial justice and racial equality. So when black girls like Joyce Williams of Chicago begin seeking admission into white communities, sometimes they have to wait four and five years before they get an acceptance of yes. She herself, when she first applies to admission to the order of St. Benedict in St. Joseph, Minnesota, is rejected in 1944. They are so impressed with her application, though, is that they give her a full scholarship to their college. She continues to apply, and she continues to be rejected. In 1948, after she receives her undergraduate degree and begins teaching in a local Catholic school, she applies again, and the sisters tell her, We do not know what your people eat, even though she’s been at their university for four years.
Not until a new superior is elected who is her former dean, does she get admitted. So in 1949, her dean lets her in, and she remains until her death. Those who go in sometimes experience horrific experiences of racism. The Sister Daniel-Maurice Miles, who enters into the community of the School Sisters of St. Francis in 1949, remember that they had forced their lighter skin Black members to pass for White. In her testimony, she said, I tried to act and talk and live white because it was the only way I’d be accepted at all in the convent. And I forgot my own culture and my own Black parents down south and tried my best to be what the white nuns wanted me to. The other sisters always laughed at me for the way that I talked and walked, and I tried not to resent their laughter. In fact, I tried to laugh right along with them. During recreation time, I’d walk up to the sisters and they’d turn away when they saw me coming. I I used to pray to God to change me. Change me and not them so that I’d be acceptable to them, and they wouldn’t turn away when they saw me coming.
Some of the sisters, when I tried a little group, would tell me, No, get out of here. This was after I did everything I knew how to try to become white, and I was ashamed of being black then, and nobody really let me be as white as I tried. Some sisters still have to leave the United States. This is Sister Mary Lou Gard, Phyllis Ray Johnson, Johnson, who was rejected admission into all the contemplative communities in the United States. In 1948, she takes two years, learns French, and then enters into a French-speaking community in Canada, where she remains until her death in the early ’90s. And I will end with this example. This is Dr. Frances Douglas, who is a native of Brooklyn, New York. She is the first African-American daughter of the heart of Mary. She is also the first African-American to earn a PhD in psychology from Fordham University. She’s also the first African-American to chair a department at a historically white University in the United States. She’s the first African-American chair at DePaul University in 1956, and lady the first woman of color to chair a department at Marquette University in 1963.
Because her community did not wear habits, most of her colleagues never knew that she was a nun. This was a shock to them. What’s also significant about this is that for years, we thought that the first African-American to Chair a Department at a White University was the great historian, Dr. John Hope Franklin, who became the first chair of the history department at Brooklyn College in 1956. However, because we were not paying attention to nuns, they did not realize that Francis Johnson, who at the same time became the head of the Department at DePaul University, started a little bit before him. So technically, she beat him. So that’s one thing among many things that my book did. I want to stop there, and I want to stop there in part by saying that the story of America’s Real Sister Act is the story of how generations of African-descended women and girls fought against racism, sexism, and exclusion to answer God’s call on their lives and minister as consecrated women religious within the Roman Catholic Church. Theirs is a story that is not relegated to simply Black history or simply Sister’s history or Catholic history. It is a human story.
It is the American experience. It is a representative of the Catholic experience. It is one that I believe that every Catholic should know. If we are indeed going to defeat the sin of racism, one way to begin to do that is to look at the blueprint that has been given to us by the nation’s Black Catholic Sisters. It is a rich history. It is a painful history, but it’s one that we must all confront and embrace if we ever seek a chance at true reconciliation, justice, and peace. Thank you. If there is a little bit of time, if anyone has any questions, I’m happy to take as many as time allows. Awesome presentation, by the way. Thank you so much. Thank you. A lot of parallels between, say, Bishop Healey of Maine and Father Tolton, and that they had to study abroad, and if they were more lightly complected, that made it more acceptable. I know your focus was on nuns, but did you see those parallels in in the Creece experience as well? Absolutely. So the difference, though, because he had three sisters who all entered religious life as well. Two remained until death, and then one got married and then passed as Irish for the remainder of her time.
I would say the difference between the Heleys. One thing is the story of the Healeys and the story of Mother Teresa, Max, and Doucement has oftentimes been used as the example for how racially ambiguous African descendant Catholic approach passing within the church. Excuse me. And what I say is that actually the story of Rebecca Clifford is far more example. The Healey’s are attempting to distance themselves from their African-ness. We know that they are, and for those who don’t know the Healey’s, they are born to an enslaved mother and an Irish planter father. And after the death of their father, James Healey inherits the enslaved property and sells it and gives it to the College of the Holy Cross. We also know that he took his counterparts to a blackface minstral show, too. So his racial politics are unique for the time because Black Catholic knew who he was. And so during the Color Catholic Congress movement of the late 19th century, they invited him to come, and he refused them. Whereas, Tultin comes. Tultin himself is born to Catholic enslaved parents. His mother was enslaved in Kentucky and then sold away from her family into Illinois, marries her father who goes to fight in the Civil War and dies, and then their mother in a very heroic moment escapes and brings the family into Illinois.
The Tultans are grounded in the Black Catholic community. They do not evidence any racial self-hatred that we see very much reflected in the story of the Healeys. Communities, which is a bit more complicated. But certainly when we talk about Black priests, their fight is very similar. The earliest generations are forced to go outside of the United States. Also, Tultan dies very young. He dies of a heat stroke, work to death, experiencing horrific racism. And then not until really the formation of the SVD seminary in Bayes St. Louis, first in Mississippi, and then it moves to Bayes St. Louis in Mississippi, do we have a seminary that will train black men? But the question is, will they be ordained in the United States? So we know that of that earliest generation of black Catholic men who are educated at the SVD seminary, and then also with the Josephites, they are sent outside of the United States to minister. They are sent to the Caribbean. They are sent to Africa. So the first black bishop of Ghana, right of Accra, is an African-American graduate of the SVD seminary in Mississippi. So they have a very similar story.
But I think what I want to say, too, is before they’re Black priests, they’re Black sisters. And the fight for Black sisters was absolutely essential to the fight for Black priests because there was so much opposition to the ordination of Black men to the priesthood, because within the Roman Catholic Church, women cannot access formal power. Yes, sisters are very powerful, but they cannot become priest. And so for the African-American Catholic community, it was essential that they raised up a community of Black priests who could speak for the community. So what’s very significant about Black Sisters and how that connects to the history of Black priests, Black Sisters never make up more than one-half of one % of the national population of Catholic Sisters for most of their history. And yet they educate over 50 % of the first two generations of African-American priests. They are doing the work within their communities to nurture those vocations. So preparing them for they can build up this community of Black priests. That being said, it took really until the 1960s before you had bishops who were willing to even assign African-American priests to African-American parishes. That becomes a huge fight of the 1960s.
Many of these early African-American priests, either they were sent outside of the United States or they were hidden away as instructors in seminaries, or they could only become assistant pastors. The struggles are linked, and yet there will be tension, certainly by the 1960s, because it also creates a dynamic within the African-American Catholic community where Black men are denied these leadership opportunities, whereas Black sisters, even though they can’t become priests, are leaders in the community. They’re principals of schools. These are women who have been allowed to exercise leadership, and they also have respect of community. You ask who is the most respected person in Washington, DC, in the Black Catholic community in the 1960s and 1970s. They’re going to name you Anablaid Sister of Providence, who was the Principal of one of the many Black Catholic schools there. But how is that going to create tension between Black Catholic sisters and Black priests? Because these men have been denied this opportunity to exercise leadership within their own communities. It’s a complex story that’s interconnected, because I would also say many of these early Black priests have sisters who are nuns. They’re coming from these communities that have nurtured them, and yet their church is denying them the opportunity to lead in a way that is also not reflective of what happened with other marginalized groups groups within the church.
There’s a wonderful quote from Mother Theodore-Williams, who is the founder of the Franciscan Handmaids, and she said, The Africans can have priests, the Chinese can have priests, the Italians can have priests, but why can’t the American Negroes? We really have to think about the ways in which the community has been undercut institutionally, and it becomes, and it’s very much tied to that story. That’s a very long answer, but thank you.
Good evening. Did you, in your research, come across any information regarding the role of Black Sisters in the Civil Rights Movement of the ’50s and ’60s?
Absolutely. Either externally, out in the community or within their communities? Absolutely. Thank you so much for that question. If you read the book, there is a chapter on, specifically, on the one hand, why we don’t see as many images of Black Sisters marching as we think we should, but also recognizing the limitations on Black Sisters and why, one, they were marching, and two, they would continue marching long after the ’60s and the ’70s. If you look at the cover of my book, I have Sister Marie-Antonia Ebo on the cover. Sister Marie-Antonia Ebo is a member of that community who was forced to profess her vows separately. She is among the first six sisters to go to Selma, Alabama. She’s one of two African-American sisters to go to Selma, Alabama, in March. She also will march in Ferguson, Missouri. She will be the only Catholic sister or priest to march in Ferguson several decades later and speak to the press. So one, Black Sisters absolutely marched. We know Black Sisters march and are the only Catholic Sisters to march at the march on Washington, even though the Archbishop of Washington, O’ Boyle, told Sisters not to march.
The Obelais Sisters of who are stationed at St. Augustine in Washington, DC, do march. We know that they are there. We also know that they participate in Selma Sympathy Marches. We have the photographs of them in the Washington Post marching there. It’s important to remember that Black Sisters occupy a very precarious position within the church. They are women religious. They are canonical communities. They’re both founded as dioceses and communities, and then they become canonical communities. But the argument The argument that was made by the superiors was that the survival of their schools was most important. That as integration came, what was sacrificed were, and this is true in the secular story, but also within the Catholic story, was that if a school was going to be integrated, generally, the Black school would be closed, and children, not all of them, but some of them would be integrated into the White school. Black sisters believe that integration would not go… They basically correctly predicted that Black children and Black faculty would not be welcomed into Catholic schools. They said, If our schools close, what will happen if integration fails? We will not have the educational infrastructure that had supported the community.
Remembering that most Black administered Catholic schools had the highest ratings of both their Black and White counterparts. And so that is where the focus was. So you will see members of the Obelate Sisters of Providence, the Franciscan Sisters of Mary, and the Sisters of the Holy Family marching in open housing marches. They march in various civil rights marches. They’re among the earliest to do so, and also will continue to do so long after some sisters abandon the movement. But their primary goal was specifically to make sure that their schools stayed open, in part because they did not trust how integration would be administered and how Black students and Black faculty would be treated within those spaces. That being said, that also is a cause for a lot of sisters departing from religious life. They believe that their superiors are being short-sided, believing that sisters should be marching and fighting to keep the schools open, where the superiors are trying to hold on to their schools and also their sisters by any means necessary, because they were always outnumbered in the first place. One thing that I will say is that the Black orders and the Black superiors were very supportive of their sisters until they began to get in trouble from the bishops.
So one example that I give in my book, which is very, very significant, is that many Black sisters, when their sister started marching, there’s one oblate sister of providence who gets arrested because she’s bailing people out of jail. In Washington, DC. She’s using St. Francis money to do all of these things. They’re hosting civil rights meetings. They’re doing all of these things. But the priests who minister at those schools begin to write confidential letters to the superior saying, You need to get this sister in line. Now, Now, if you understand the authoritarian nature of religious life, these younger sisters don’t know that the priest has written to their superior to tell the superior to get them in line. They think their superior is getting them in line. And so there are these huge fights, and we see a great exodus of Black sisters from religious life. One thing that I noticed in the archive, and it’s so tragic, after these priests would say, You need to either fire this sister, remove her, replace her, or whatever, and say all these horrible things, then he say, Make sure you destroy this letter. And the one thing that…
And so imagine a sister who is a radical. If you look at her in the 1930s, she’s among the radicals. She’s making sure that they’re teaching Black history. She’s doing all of these things. But she’s also trying to hold on to an infrastructure in this system where Black Catholics have been systematically marginalized, ignored, subjected to horrific forms of racism within the church. And then you’re trying to hold on to this church. And so you have a superior trying to navigate this. And so she may, in fact, replace the sister. And because that sister doesn’t know that there’s pressure coming from the bishop, she thinks it’s her superior. And so she writes a nasty letter to her superior, and she leaves, right? That happens so often with the Black superiors and the Black communities. And so what we also see are communities that are deeply committed to racial justice in a host of ways, but a community community that’s also dealing with the impact of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, the calls, the great opening up of the American workplace, but also the realities of racism within the structure of the church. Some of these sisters now who are lay women or in another community, they’ll say, Had I known what was happening, I wish we could have had that conversation.
But the one thing about the Black orders is that they were oftentimes stricter than their White counterparts counterparts because they were so vulnerable. Imagine what women have to do when your white counterparts can go meet with the bishop, they can get on his schedule, but you can’t even get on the schedule because you’re black, and you have to go through the back doors, and you just have to wait for hours upon hours for the bishop to see you. The Black orders are also stricter in the sense that they have never abandoned the habit. If you see an African-American sister in the United States, you’ll know, generally, if she’s a member of a Black of a white order or a White order, because you’ll know if she’s wearing a habit or not. And the members of the African-American orders have always said, We would never give up the habit because we fought too hard to have them. And so some people may perceive that as conservative, but that’s not conservative. It’s actually a radical act that they are making. They’re saying we’re not giving it up because they denied us that respect, that honor, that privilege, and that right to pursue a vocation.
And so what is political is going to be a little bit different when you talk about Black sisters because of their precarious position with in the church. I hope that’s helpful.
Thank you for everything you’ve been doing. My question to you is a piece of advice because I’m a young priest trying to get the young people back to the church. Then you are confronted with that. Catholic church is for the white people, and you got the evangelical also pushing that for them. How do you approach it in Because I have many of them, and you even see priests talking about that. That’s not something in the past. Even now, when you look at the growing level of Hispanic and Black in the church. There are some church, when they start even going there, they exit the church. Some of the white people exit the church. What you will give me as a piece of advice when I’m meeting with those young people who are saying that and to bring them back. We have a lot of parents here. The children are exiting the church because when they learn about those things, that’s my question.
Thank you. Thank you so much for that. I think that I think the problem is complex in part because, one, the infrastructure that has sustained the Black Catholic community for as long as it’s been here is being dismantled. When we see the closings of Black Catholic schools and parishes. We know that Catholic schools have been the primary sites for evangelization within the African-American community. In fact, we know that African-American Catholics and African-Americans educated in Catholic schools have the highest educational success rate than any other group in the nation. When we talk about how many African… What’s always really interesting is the US Black Catholic community is relatively small. Now, I don’t want to say that it’s too small because it’s larger than many other Black denominations. But if there are only maybe three or four million Black Catheter in the United States, there are tens of millions of Black people who’ve been educated in Catholic schools. There are two kinds of stories that are happening. But I wanted to say one thing, without the educational infrastructure and the worship infrastructure, it’s an impossibility. If we’re not going to talk about that, that’s going to be difficult.
But I’ll say But it’s for my own self. I was educated in a predominantly white Southern suburban church, and I probably shouldn’t even say predominantly white. There were only two African-American families in my suburban church. My mother, who grew up Catholic in Savannah, Georgia, had only grown up in black parishes. But when my mom raised us, she was very adamant that we go to the church that’s in our community, and if they don’t treat us, they’re not real Catholics. She regrets that now because that almost pushed my sister and I out the church. I had one foot outside of the church before I came to this project. When I started interviewing the sisters, they didn’t even realize I was… Let me say, I wasn’t struggling with my faith. I had my belief in God. I just didn’t know if I still belonged in the Catholic church because I didn’t know any of the history. As I said before, my mother is the first black woman to graduate from the University of Notre Dame. Everybody in my family told me that. The one person who never brought that up was my mother. She cannot talk about it.
The only thing my mother has ever about Notre Dame is that my sister and I were not supposed to go. It took me years before I read the oral history interviews of the first women who were at Notre Dame because my mother was at St. Mary’s, and then she transferred. She was at St. Mary’s from ’70 to ’72, and Notre Dame started admitting women in ’72, and so she transferred. She met with Father Hesberg, and with her two friends, they asked, Do you mean all women can come? And he said, Yes. And so they went. But it was a difficult experience for my mother. I didn’t even know the history because my mother never let on. I came to this by chance, although the sisters would tell me it’s providential serendipity. Because what happened was when I started interviewing the sisters, and I was hearing stories that just they were gut-wrenching. I had to ask those sisters, How could you stay? And what I got were answers that transformed me. I can only say that I experienced a metanoia because these women were at peace, and I wanted to know that peace. And I want to say, as much as there is a painful history there, there are some beautiful stories here.
I mean, they tell me of their grandparents and great-grandparents. One Holy Family Sister in New Orleans said, My grandfather would put all of his grandchildren in a circle at New Years and pray over each of them on our rural Louisiana farm. The beauty of these stories, despite the pain, despite the humiliation, but something that if I went back to that image of that profession, What was really profound is that when you look at that and these women being forced to profess their vows in a segregated ceremony, the shame is not on those women. You ask yourselves, when you hear these stories of Black Catholics who were pushed to the back of communion lines, where you had priests who would put on gloves before they would offer the Eucharist to Black Catholics, people who cooked and cleaned for these priests, but then to do this show, who would use a separate cup, just horrific stories that happened to people. I said, Why would you go back to that church? And they said, Because I was going to make that priest shame God every day, every time. We are going to walk up to him and we are going to make him shame God.
And at some point, hopefully that priest will get it. But these are people who would never abandon their church to racist or surrender their church to someone who could not affirm the life and dignity of all people. That is the power. That is the radicalness of the teachings of universal Christianity. But I think we need the stories. The problem is these stories have not been made universal to Black Catholic. A lot of Black Catholic don’t know these histories. The Sisters are dying, the priests are dying. That those who carry the stories that have not been preserved are dying. For me, I know I stayed because the stories. Some people thought, well, wouldn’t the stories make you run away? No. They make me determined to stay because I didn’t lose my faith. I just didn’t know if I had a place within the church. Those are two separate things. What we have to remember is that it’s not a bad thing. It’s one thing for people to say, I’m done with God, but I don’t believe in God. It’s just people are looking for a welcoming place where they can worship God. So that is really a reflection on us.
And that’s not an answer. But what I will say is that until this history is taught as Catholic history, I don’t even know if we have a shot, right? Because this is not just Black people’s history, right? This is every Catholic’s history. There’s not a state in this nation in which Black sisters or a priest has not served. We’ve been here from the very beginning, and the reality is Black Catholic history, in fact, proceeds a lot of European Catholic history. There are Black Catholic who have history roots that are much deeper than their European counterparts. Now, imagine that Black person being then rejected from a Catholic parish. Yes, it’s uncatholic. It’s also obscene. But how will we know if it’s obscene if nobody knows the history? That’s not a good answer, but… Thank you. Thank you. Remarkable.