A Brief History of African American Catholics
Adapted from Fr. Cyprian Davis, OSB
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Black Catholics in Colonial America

• 1565: Spain established a military outpost at St. Augustine, in present-day Florida. From the start, the Spanish settlers included black men and women, both free and slaves. Baptismal records document the continual presence of blacks and biracial children over the nearly 200 years of Spanish settlement there.
• Early 1700s: Spanish promised freedom to slaves in the Carolinas and other English colonies, if they escaped to Florida and converted to Catholicism.
• 1724: Having settled Mobile and New Orleans along the Gulf Coast, the French declared the Code Noir, a set of laws governing the rights and lives of the slave population, including a requirement that all slaves be "instructed and baptized in the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Religion…" Sexual relations between slaves and slave owners were prohibited yet commonplace; children of owners and slaves became a class of free people--landowners, entrepreneurs, and craftsmen--known as creoles of color. New Orleans would become the largest slave mart in the South.
• 1781: Of the eleven families who migrated from northern Mexico to establish the town of Los Angeles, all were Catholic and more than half were black.
• 1724. English colony of Maryland created as a refuge for Catholics seeking religious freedom. Although Catholic control of the colony did not last, Maryland maintained a strong Catholic culture. Maryland's first Bishop, John Carroll, reported to the Vatican in 1785 that about one of every five Catholics in Maryland was black, both slave and free.

Slavery in the Antebellum U.S.

Slavery was a cruel social institution that corrupted the entire history of the United States. It divided the nation. It divided religion. It touched every part of the Catholic Church. In 1839, Pope Gregory XVI condemned slavery in the document Supremo Apostolatus Fastigio, but this made little impact. Catholic slaveholders did not consider slavery immoral, since the Bible did not forbid it. Many priests and religious sisters owned slaves. So did some bishops. Even some African American Catholics had slaves. A black person might purchase a slave in order to be able to marry him or her and the spouse remained, legally, a slave.

Religious Women

Long before the Civil War or the ordination of a single black priest, African American women were spreading the faith and ministering to the needy.

• 1829: Four Haitian women began the Oblate Sisters of Providence with the assistance of Jacques Joubert de la Muraille, a Sulpician priest. Their founder, Mother Elizabeth Lange, opened schools and orphanages for black children. Despite opposition, there were black women who entered the convent with their manumission papers in one hand and their religious vows in the other.
• 1840s: Henriette Delille (1812-1862), Juliette Gaudin (1808-1887), and Josephine Charles (1812-1885), free persons of color, formed a community to serve the needs of ex-slaves, teach catechism to the children of slaves, and help to witness at marriages and baptisms. Sometime after 1841, these women evolved into religious sisters, today called the Sisters of the Holy Family.
• 1916: A third religious community of black women, the Franciscan Handmaids of the Most Pure Heart of Mary, began in Savannah, Georgia. Soon after, their founder, Mother Theodore Williams (1868-1931), moved the community to Harlem, New York where the sisters taught school and established various ministries to serve families and children.

A fourth religious community of note, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, was not founded by an African American woman, yet the work of the SBS sisters empowered generations of African Americans through education and faith. St. Katharine Drexel founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in 1890 to evangelize African Americans and Native Americans. Heir to a banking fortune, Katharine opened many Catholic schools for black children in the South. She also gave money to the NAACP and the congressional anti-lynching campaign in the 1930s. Most importantly, she founded Xavier University of Louisiana, the only black Catholic university in the United States.

Evangelization after Emancipation

• 1866: Second Plenary Council of Catholic Bishops held in Baltimore, in part to decide how to minister to freed slaves. After bitter debates, the bishops decided to invite missionaries from Europe to evangelize American blacks.
• 1871: The Mill Hill Fathers-who later became the Josephites-began ministry to African Americans in the South.
• 1872: Escaping religious persecution in Germany, the Spiritan Fathers, led by Father Joseph Strub, emigrated to the United States. Founders of Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, the Spiritans ministered to African Americans and impoverished immigrants.

Black Priests in the United States

The first African American priests were James Augustine Healy (1830-1900), Patrick Francis Healy, S.J. (1834-1910), and Alexander Sherwood Healy (1836-1874). The Healy brothers were three of ten children born in Georgia to Mary Eliza, a slave, and her owner, Michael Morris Healy, an Irish immigrant and landowner. Healy sent all of the children to the North, where they did not consider themselves as black. James, Patrick, and Alexander eventually completed seminary in Europe. In 1875, James became the first African American bishop, leading the Diocese of Portland, Maine. Patrick was never recognized as black. A Jesuit, Patrick was the first president of Georgetown University-ironically, an institution that did not accept black students until the time of the civil rights movement.

The first African American priest who was known and recognized as black was Augustus Tolton (1854-1897). Tolton was born on a Missouri plantation. Both of his parents devout Catholics and slaves. At the outbreak of the Civil War, his father fled to freedom in St. Louis, where the Union Army was stationed. Later, Tolton's mother fled to freedom in Quincy, Illinois, rowing across the Mississippi River with her three children. In Quincy, they lived in the midst of poverty and deep racism.

Educated in Catholic schools, Augustus Tolton felt called to the priesthood, but no seminary in the United States accepted blacks. Various priests in Illinois tutored him in foreign languages and history and encouraged his vocation. He gained admission to a seminary in Rome and at the age of 32 was ordained there, at the prestigious Basilica of St. John Lateran. Upon his return to the United States, overflow crowds in three states gathered for his first masses.

Popular with both black and white parishioners in Quincy, Father Tolton encountered hostility from a neighboring priest. He sought reassignment and became pastor of the only black parish in Chicago. Under constant scrutiny in a racist environment, Tolton had to raise funds for his parish church and was called upon to minister to African Americans far and wide who saw him as their priest-it was arduous and lonely work. In poor health, he was only 43 when he died. In 2010, the Archdiocese of Chicago initiated Father Tolton's cause for sainthood.

In 1906, the Society of the Divine Word began serving black Catholics in the South. By 1921, with the blessing of Pope Benedict XV, the Society had established the first America seminary where black students could prepare for the priesthood.

Daniel Rudd and the First National Black Catholic Congresses

The vision to bring together the national African American Catholic community came not from a priest or bishop, nor from a political leader, but from a layman, journalist and lecturer, Daniel Rudd (1854-1933). Born to into slavery in Kentucky, Rudd moved north after the Civil War to attend high school. In his thirties, he began a weekly newspaper for Black Catholics. Convinced that the Catholic Church was the one great hope for African Americans, Rudd organized a series of national congresses of lay leaders. For Rudd it was important that black Catholics should get to know each other and work together. From 1889 to 1894, there were five black congresses. These congresses went a long way in helping black Catholics have an understanding of what their religion should mean for them, as well as to establish a pattern of black laity leadership initiatives.

Civil Rights Leadership

Thomas Wyatt Turner (1877-1978), the son of black Catholic sharecroppers from Maryland, later assumed leadership of the black Catholic community. A biology professor at Howard University and Hampton University, Turner worked against racism and racial segregation within in the Church. In 1924, he organized the Federated Colored Catholics, insisting it should be directed by a lay person. Turner called for an increase in the number of black priests and the opening of all Catholic schools to black students.

Alexander Pierre Tureaud (1899-1972), of St. Augustine Parish in New Orleans, was at one time the only black attorney in his home-state of Louisiana. Like other civil rights leaders, Tureaud studied at the Howard University School of Law, learning legal stratagems to dismantle the segregationist institutions known as "Jim Crow" laws. Among his many judicial victories was ending laws that gave white teachers a higher salary than black teachers in Louisiana. Another leading Catholic attorney, a convert to the faith named Earl Johnson (1928-1988), had also studied at Howard University and worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. to fight segregation laws in Florida.

Black Catholics were at the forefront of successful legal battles for civil rights, but Protestant leaders, like King, Abernathy, and Jesse Jackson, had organized and led the early civil rights demonstrations. In March 1965, King invited clergy and religious women to Selma, Alabama to demonstrate for the Voting Rights Act. For the first time, Catholic nuns and priests, black and white, joined the Protestant religious leaders, standing side by side as people of faith committed to the rights of African Americans. Thereafter Catholic leaders participated in public demonstrations for civil rights.

The situation deteriorated. In 1968, King's assassination sparked riots. That same month, African American priests and brothers from across the country gathered in Detroit to ask the question: "What can we do?" For the first time in their history, black Catholic clergy discussed their feelings, discouragement, anger, and expectations. The outgrowth of this meeting was an organization that continues to this day, the National Black Catholic Clergy Caucus.

Black Catholic Leadership Organizations

In the early 20th century, several Josephite priests and three laymen cofounded the Knights of Peter Claver as a fraternal and charity organization for Black Catholic men. Within two decades, the KPC had spread across the South and affiliated organizations emerged for women and youth--the Ladies Auxiliary of Peter Claver, the Junior Knights and the Junior Daughters. Today, the Knights, Ladies, and Juniors flourish in parishes across the United States and there is even a unit in the country of Colombia.

The other major national organizations for black Catholics were created in the wake of the civil rights movement. These include:

• National Black Catholic Clergy Caucus
• National Black Catholic Seminarians Association
• National Black Sisters' Conference
• National Office of Black Catholics (which today is part of the Secretariat for Cultural Diversity at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops)
• Institute for Black Catholic Studies at Xavier University of Louisiana
• National Association of Black Catholic Administrators

All of these organizations, together with the Knights and Ladies of Peter Claver and the African American bishops collaborate under an umbrella organization known as the National Black Catholic Congress (NBCC), which is headquartered in Baltimore.

The NBCC is an independent organization that promotes the evangelization and advancement of African Americans. Continuing the tradition of Daniel Rudd, the NBCC has organized a national congress every five years, since 1987. Youth and young adults, laity, clergy, religious, and bishops all gather to deepen our Catholic and African American connections and to identify an agenda for action. This African American Catholic Youth Bible is another initiative of the NBCC. The "Congress" website, www.nbccongress.org, is a comprehensive resource for African American Catholics.

Catholic Church: Black and Beautiful

In short, the Church in America has flourished and developed thanks to the courage, spirituality, and tireless witness of faithful black laity, clergy, and religious. This work was often supported in solidarity by people of other backgrounds. That said, the Church in America on the whole was often slow to see and act upon racism in its midst. In the post-civil rights era, this began to change in significant ways. The U.S. bishops addressed racism and the Catholic Church in a pastoral letter, Brothers and Sisters to Us (1979). Five years later, the black bishops wrote, What We Have Seen and Hear(1984), followed later by, For the Love of One Another (1989). Finally, the Pontifical Commission on Justice and Peace published The Church and Racism: Towards a More Fraternal Society (1988). These documents honor the rich Scripturally-centered spirituality of African American Catholicism and condemn the sinfulness of racism in the Church and in society.

To further Black spirituality and leadership in the Church, black Catholic theologians founded a three-week summer institute at Xavier University of Louisiana. The Institute for Black Catholic Studies is an intellectual center for African and African American students, encouraging scholarship in theology, liturgy, and ministry.

Black Catholics have been active in America and in the Church from the very earliest settlements in the so-called "New World." During slavery, poverty, segregation, and exclusion, courageous and holy African Americans relied on their faith and dedicated themselves to living and sharing it. Every reader of this Bible has some mighty footprints in which to walk!

For more inspiration, take a look at the authoritative work of Cyprian Davis O.S.B, which was the basis of this brief essay: The History of Black Catholics in the United States (Crossroad Publishing, 1990).