Other Great Blacks

Mother Mary Lange | Mother Henriette Delille | Pierre Toussaint

Elizabeth Clarisse Lange (aka Mother Mary)
Born cira 1784 - Died February 3, 1882

Elizabeth Clarisse Lange's parents were refugees who fled to Cuba from the revolution taking place in their native Saint Dominque known today as Haiti. Her father was a gentleman of some financial means and social standing. Her mother was a Creole. However, in the early 1800's young Elizabeth left Santiago de Cuba to seek peace and security in the United States. Providence directed her to Baltimore, Maryland where a great influx of French-speaking Catholic San Dominguios refugees was settling.

About 1813 Elizabeth Lange came to Baltimore. She was a courageous, loving, and deeply spiritual woman. She came as a strong, independent thinker and doer. Although she was a refugee, she was well educated, and of independent means, possessing monies left to her by her father. It did not take long to recognize that the children of her fellow refugees needed education. She determined to respond to that need in spite of being a black woman in a slave state long before the Emancipation Proclamation; she used her own money and home to educate children of color. For ten years Elizabeth, with a friend Marie Magdaline Balas, offered free education.

Mother Mary Clarisse Lane, OSP was the founder and the initial "Superior General" of the Oblate Sisters of Providence, the first Back Roman Catholic order to operate in the United States. This congregation would educate and evangelize African Americans. Yet they would always be open to meeting the needs of the times. Thus the Oblate Sisters educated youth and provided a home for orphans. Slaves who had been purchased and freed were educated and at time admitted into the congregations.

Mother Mary Lange practiced faith to an extraordinary degree. In fact, it was her deep faith, which enabled her to persevere against all odds. To her black brothers and sisters she gave of herself and her material possessions until she was empty of all but Jesus, whom she shared generously with all by being a living witness to his teaching. In close union with her God, she lived through a disappointment opposition until God called her to Himself February 3, 1882.

Mother Mary Lange | Mother Henriette Delille | Pierre Toussaint