Reading as a Subversive Act: Libraries as the Guide to Liberation
By Fr. Cyprian Davis, O.S.B.
Copyright, Catholic Library Association; Catholic Library World 78:4 (June 2008), 302-305.
Reprinted with permission.
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Black Catholics were to be found both in the South and in the North. Slaves and free, many black Catholics also sought learning. In reading the accounts of many blacks who learned to read secretly, the major desire was to learn to read in order to read the Bible. For black Catholics there were also efforts to be taught the catechism. There is an example of black Catholics in Philadelphia who petitioned the "Board of Trustees of St. Mary's Church Philadelphia, held November 15, 1817, that the children might learn the catechism."

The black Catholic petitioners acknowledged that they did not have the money "to acquire the knowledge of our religion and the duties whereby they might be to repel the incessant attacks." The petitioners go on to say that those who wish to proselytize their children "can quote the Scriptures with every phrase in order to seduce the ignorant." They remark that some of their children have been seduced from our religion. They are asking for the same help to be given them as given to the white Catholics in need of aid. Six men signed the petition. The board decided to postpone any decision until later.

It is not known whether it was answered later.⁸

The importance of books for Black Catholics can be seen in the activity of the Society of the Holy Family, a black Catholic Mutual Benefit Society in 1843 in Baltimore. This society met weekly in the basement of the cathedral parish. The two hundred black men and women met together to listen to a conference by the assistant priest, sing some hymns, recite the rosary, and have Masses said for the deceased. The society, it seems, had free people and slaves. The members decided to establish a lending library and to purchase a book case. In the beginning one would borrow a book for one cent for a month and then one cent for each week thereafter. Later the cost went up to two cents. The library had catechisms, lives of the saints, devotional books, and Catholic hymns.⁹

Black religious congregations of women were founded before the Civil War. In 1829, a community of black women began in Baltimore known as the Oblate Sisters of Providence. The founder was Mary Elizabeth Lange (c1784-1882) who came to this country about 1827. With the help of Jacques Joubert, S.S., and three other women of color they began a school in 1827, one of the first black Catholic schools in the United States.

Henriette Delille (1812-1862), born in New Orleans, a free woman of color, descendant of slaves, began her ministry for the poor, the destitute, the catechism for the slaves and the free, along with two other women of color. They taught and they nurtured slaves and free. They especially worked for the baptism of slave infants and they encouraged the Sacrament of Marriage for adult slaves. They became known as the Sisters of the Holy Family. By the 1840s they had evolved into a religious community of sisters. Both the Oblate Sisters of Providence and the Sisters of the Holy Family brought reading and writing to the black community in an urban background. They were black women of faith in Baltimore and New Orleans who lit the light of learning in the black Catholic community before the Civil War.

Following the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, there was a tremendous movement by the freed slaves to learn how to read and to write. Janet Cornelius wrote: "…freed slaves enthusiastically grasped opportunities to learn to read and to write openly and legally." She quoted Booker T. Washington's remark, "It was a whole race trying to go to school. Few were too young, and none too old, to make the attempt to learn." He said in another place that men and women in their seventies wanted to learn to read the Bible before they died. Others remarked that the freed slaves joined together in groups to read to each other.¹⁰

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