The Remarkable Journey of Black Catholics in Louisiana

All Photos: Black Catholic History Mass, Saint Mary of the Pines (November 7, 2021); Kierstin Richter

“The early popes, followers, and fathers of the Church were made up of a myriad of skin tones and ethnicities, not unlike the unique melting-pot culture of Louisiana.”

BY KATE RHEA

“North Africa was the Bible belt of early Christianity,” said Christopher Bellitto, a church historian at Kean University in New Jersey. “And Carthage was the buckle,” he added, referring to the city located in modern-day Tunisia.

Three early popes hailed from that region: the fourteenth pope, Victor I (circa 189-198 A.D.); the 32nd pope, Miltiades (311-314 A.D.); and the 49th pope, Gelasius I (492-496 A.D.). These three popes are considered by scholars to be the Black popes.

The Rev. Cyprian Davis, a Benedictine priest who is a leading historian of African-American Catholicism, explains, “it’s important for us to look and say that yes, the early papacy was not white … it was much more diverse than you might think.”

The early popes, followers, and fathers of the Church were made up of a myriad of skin tones and ethnicities, not unlike the unique melting-pot culture of Louisiana. These second, third, and fifth-century African popes represented the culture and color of the Roman Empire, physically resembling modern middle-easterners rather than West or Sub-Saharan African peoples we would describe as Black today, but their appointment during the first few hundred years demonstrates a climate of diversity within the Church; a racial and cultural diversity that the Catholic Church in the United States would struggle and often fail to realize.

With slavery being interwoven in the birth and early development of the United States, featuring prominently in her most intimate internal conflict - the American Civil War, and lingering within cultural identities of citizens hundreds of years later, Black Catholicism did not progress and expand through modern times in the same way it did in other countries around the world.

In 2020, 1,832 years after the first African pope, Pope Francis appointed Archbishop Wilton Gregory as the first African-American Cardinal forcing many to recognize the appointment as a confounding example of that lagging progress. Staggering as that nearly 2,000-year gap may be, the relative absence of African Catholics didn’t begin with what some scholars deem America’s original sin of slavery.

The early Muslim conquests, which began with the arrival of the Islamic prophet Muhammad in the seventh century, spread Islam throughout the Levant, Persia, and into Northern Africa; to this day, those areas are predominantly Muslim. As a result of religious wars and the shifting of powers in Europe, Northern Africa, and the Middle East up until the twentieth century, Catholics from Sub-Saharan and West African areas accounted for less than one percent of Catholics worldwide.

The unique identity of Black Catholics in America would be realized starting in the eighteenth century, growing for the next hundred years and Louisiana, with its main cultural influences being French, Spanish, and West African would lead the way toward that realization.

Due to the distinctive class and societal structure created in Louisiana, and the former French possession of Louisiana, free people of color, or gens de couleur libre, were able to form their own identity in which Catholicism played a large role. “During the early eighteenth century. Capuchin missionaries as well as Ursuline nuns built and maintained churches and schools for all people in south Louisiana, no matter their race or social status.” Proselytization of slaves and free people of color pre-Civil War in Louisiana gave way to integrated Catholic congregations by the time parishes were officially designated in 1861. The prevalence of being “in-between,” ethnically, yet bound by the Catholic faith and the French language ensured multi-racial Catholic congregations.

Louisiana had, for a time, distinguished itself as relatively impervious to harshly drawn lines concerning race; for example, a mere decade after the Civil War, P. B. S. Pinchback became governor – a first for Louisiana and the United States overall. However, with the end of Reconstruction looming, Irish and German communities began to assemble private Catholic parishes, excluding themselves and discriminating against diocesan interracial congregations. This self-segregation by different immigrant communities started before the Civil War but became more prominent in the

years leading up to 1900. It was during this ambiguous period in Louisiana, Reverend Antoine Blanc founded the first Black Catholic Parish in the United States - St. Augustine Church in New Orleans.

The progress of Black Catholicism, championed by such prominent figures as Daniel Rudd, Servant of God Julia Greeley, Augustus Tolton, and Mathilda Taylor Beasley, OSF would soon meet a nearly insurmountable challenge to its growth – Jim Crow South.

Between 1910 and 1930, the First Great Migration saw some six million African-Americans relocating from the rural, segregated, and discriminatory southern states to the more economically stable and what they hoped would be less racially discriminatory states. An influx of African-Americans to the social, political, and economic centers of the United States – cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D. C. – resulted in more acute segregation among the diverse population remaining in the South. Aggressively-enacted laws regarding disenfranchisement, general underfunding of resources accessible to African-Americans, and discriminatory housing regulations, many of which also affected poor whites, compounded the separation of the races.

In Louisiana, this insidious transformation forced out Black Catholics by the 1920s, just as the rise of the Ku Klux Klan was reaching a fever pitch. Anti-Catholicism was rampant among those who sympathized with the Klan’s ideology, causing more instability within Black Catholic congregations.

What was once a predominately integrated Catholic colony, Louisiana changed rapidly in the late nineteenth century and throughout the early twentieth century, having been permeated by scores of white Anglo-Saxon immigrants from neighboring Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.

“Thus situated in 1920, Louisiana must have seemed like a Kleagle’s dream come true. It was a Southern state, which obviously gave it emotional ties to the Reconstruction Klan; it contained large numbers of Negroes to be “kept in their place;” there were Catholics by the score, who could be characterized as “plotters for the Pope.”

Surviving the post-war lawlessness, violence, and ever-present racial tension led to some Black Catholics in Louisiana joining in the First Great Migration in hopes of a more peaceful place to worship. Nevertheless, many Black Catholics strengthened their established congregations despite the menacing societal and cultural atmosphere in Louisiana. Evidence of this can be seen in the establishment of Xavier University in 1924, the first and only Catholic HBCU (Historically Black College or University), and in the success and growth of previously established ministries such as Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, St. Augustine Church.

Throughout the twentieth century, Black Catholics in the United States established and solidified their place in the Catholic Church by joining together with Catholics of all races to lead an organized and impassioned opposition to segregation. During the 1950 and 1960s, Black Catholics developed their own character concerning liturgy and spiritual patrimony. This period is known as the Black Catholic Movement and from it, modern Black Catholicism was born and has been passionately practiced by African-American Catholics ever since.

Since that time of rebirth, many of Louisiana’s Black Catholic community have helped to establish national organizations such as the National Black Catholic Clergy Caucus (NBCCC) in 1968, The National Black Sisters’ Conference in 1968, National Black Catholic Apostolate for Life (NBCAL) in 1997, and Our Mother of Africa Chapel inside the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception – also established in 1997.

Footnotes

1Christina Morales, “The Rise of Wilton Gregory, the First African-American Cardinal,” nytimes (The New York Times, October 25, 2020), https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/us/wilton-gregory-catholic-cardinal.html.

2Regional Distribution of Catholics, 1910 and 2012, photograph, n.d., Pew Research Center.

3John Bernard Alberts, “Origins of Black Catholic Parishes in the Archdiocese of New Orleans, 1718-1920.” (dissertation, Louisiana State University, 1998), vi.

4John Bernard Alberts, “Origins of Black Catholic Parishes in the Archdiocese of New Orleans, 1718-1920.” (dissertation, Louisiana State University, 1998), iii.

5Kenneth E. Harrell, “The Ku Klux Klan in Louisiana: 1920-1930” (dissertation, Louisiana State University, 1966), Abstract, vi.

6Kenneth E. Harrell, “The Ku Klux Klan in Louisiana: 1920-1930” (dissertation, Louisiana State University, 1966), 126.

7Matthew J. Cressler, Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration (New York: New York University Press, 2017).

Works Cited

Alberts, John Bernard. “Origins of Black Catholic Parishes in the Archdiocese of New Orleans, 1718-1920.” Dissertation, Louisiana State University, 1998.

Cressler, Matthew J. Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration. New York: New York University Press, 2017.

“Examples of Jim Crow Laws - Oct. 1960 - Civil Rights.” Examples of Jim Crow Laws . Ferris State University, Jim Crow Museum. Accessed November 9, 2021. https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/links/misclink/examples.htm.

Harrell, Kenneth E. “The Ku Klux Klan in Louisiana: 1920-1930.” Dissertation, Louisiana State University, 1966.

Morales, Christina. “The Rise of Wilton Gregory, the First African-American Cardinal.” nytimes. The New York Times, October 25, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/us/wilton-gregory-catholic-cardinal.html.

Regional Distribution of Catholics, 1910 and 2012. February 13, 2013. Photograph. Pew Research Center.