The study of southern Catholicism has endured a problematic status within the scholarship of both southern religion and American Catholicism. The Catholic Church can claim the title of the first Christian community in the South, possessing a pedigree that spans five centuries to the Spanish and French colonization of the Southeast and predating the rise of southern Protestantism. However, after the Louisiana Purchase Catholicism became a minority religion within an overwhelmingly Protestant region with a few isolated exceptions (in Louisiana and parts of the Gulf Coast).⁽¹⁾ This minority status fostered tension in the construction of a southern Catholic identity; a tension between religious and regional identification. In matters of faith, southern Catholics stood apart from southern Protestants, whose social and theological identities were defined in part by opposition to Catholicism. However, when regarding politics, culture, and especially racial attitudes, southern Catholics largely resembled their Protestant neighbors. Remarkably different in one sense yet unexceptional in others, southern Catholicism has endured a marginal position in the study of southern religion and American Catholicism because it was either too different or not different enough.⁽²⁾However, a growing body of scholarship signals recognition that the experience of the Catholic South offers a unique perspective on the region’s distinctive history. This is particularly true regarding the era of the Civil Rights Movement. As Dave Chappell and others have persuasively argued, religion and religious communities played a central role in the dynamics of the Civil Rights Movement.⁽³⁾ The three books under review demonstrate that the opposite was also true: that the African-American freedom struggle influenced southern Catholics and their religious communities.

In Black, White, and Catholic, R. Bentley Anderson explores a remarkable period of interracial cooperation against Jim Crow in the New Orleans Catholic community from the end of World War II to the eruption of Massive Resistance following Brown v. Topeka Board of Education. As James Bennett has documented, the centuries-old practice of racial integration (but not equality) in New Orleans Catholic community gave way to a segregated Church in the early twentieth century with the approval and cooperation of the Catholic hierarchy.⁽⁴⁾ After World War II, however, a changing social and theological atmosphere created a limited degree of activism among the Catholic laity against the racial status quo. Anderson explores the emergence of two Catholic interracial organizations that stood for change: the Southeastern Regional Interracial Commission (SERINCO) and the Commission on Human Rights (CHR). While both organizations possessed relatively small memberships and brief organizational existences, their activism prompted both change within Catholic institutions and potent reaction from the defenders of Jim Crow within New Orleans.

The CHR was established in 1949 as an interracial organization of Catholic laypeople dedicated to tearing down the divisions in their church imposed by Jim Crow. To achieve this goal the CHR sought to reunite black and white Catholics into a spiritual community by holding integrated masses, a Speaker’s Bureau, and by lobbying the Archbishop of New Orleans to end or modify segregation policies within the archdiocese. SERINCO was founded in 1948 and composed of college students from various New Orleans Catholic educational institutions, most notably Loyola University of the South and Xavier College, a historically black Catholic institution. Like the CHR, SERINCO desired to create a dialogue that would lead to the end of Jim Crow, particularly within Catholic schools. To promote this message SERINCO organized activities such as “Interracial Sundays” that brought white and black Catholic students together to celebrate integrated masses. Unlike later student organizations dedicated to civil rights like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), SERINCO members avoided disruptive demonstrations and instead sought to influence opinion through dialogue among other students, Catholic college administrators, and the Archdiocese of New Orleans. However, the success of such efforts at dialogue proved uneven, as evidenced in fruitless protests against campus minstrel shows and segregated theatres showing Passion plays. Nevertheless, members of the CHR and SERINCO took brave stances in an atmosphere where expressing the idea of racial equality and any sort interracial contact risked the threat of denunciation and ostracization.  

Anderson tracks how the Catholic institutions of Loyola University and the Archdiocese of New Orleans responded to the activism of the CHR and SERINCO. Just as a changing social and theological climate resulted in a degree of lay opposition to segregation, a greater degree of openness to integration also emerged among the hierarchies of these institutions. However, both the Archdiocese and Loyola University feared that a misstep in the increasingly heated racial politics of the postwar South could result in political retaliation and the prospect of financial ruin. Moreover, the majority of Catholic opinion in New Orleans and within these institutions supported Jim Crow. The issue of integration thus split the New Orleans Catholic community.

"Anderson skillfully pieces together the moral and political crisis facing Loyola University, and the challenges African-American students faced in seeking admission to Loyola."

Loyola University provides a case in point. Students from the Jesuit-sponsored university formed a key demographic of SERINCO’s membership, and the organization’s faculty advisor was an activist Jesuit professor of sociology, Father Joseph Fitcher. Fitcher worked within Loyola’s administration to pave the way for the admission of African American students to the university. Fitcher’s activism, however, resulted in acrimonious division within Loyola’s Jesuit congregation. Some Jesuits vocally defended Jim Crow in the same theological terms as their Protestant neighbors. Other Jesuits feared that the desegregation of Loyola would cause white students to abandon the university and destroy the institution generations of Jesuits had painstakingly sacrificed to establish. Anderson skillfully pieces together the moral and political crisis facing Loyola University, and the challenges African-American students faced in seeking admission to Loyola (among them, Richard Gumbel, the father of sports journalists Bryant and Greg Gumbel). While Loyola admitted a handful of black students into a number of specialized degree programs by 1950, its Law School, Graduate School, and undergraduate program remained segregated until 1962.

Like the Jesuit administration of Loyola University, the Archdiocese of New Orleans struggled to navigate the turbulent currents of civil rights activism and Massive Resistance. The navigator during these difficult times was Archbishop Joseph Francis Rummel, a German-born prelate that had served as a parish priest in Harlem and worked with African-American Catholics before his appointment in 1935 as bishop of the New Orleans Archdiocese. Rummel initially accommodated New Orleans’ racial norms and its segregated Church, stating that change required deliberation and time. However, in the postwar period Rummel became increasingly sympathetic to arguments for racial equality from groups like the CHR and SERINCO. Starting in 1953 Rummel broke with his the policies of his predecessors and issued two pastoral letters that condemned Jim Crow and announced the gradual integration of New Orleans’s Catholic institutions beginning in 1956.

Rummel’s moves toward an integrated Church contributed to the reactionary atmosphere of Massive Resistance in New Orleans. Catholic supporters of Jim Crow asked (and not without cause) why had an infallible Church that had tolerated segregation for decades now suddenly declared the practice as sinful? This vocal group explicitly questioned Archbishop Rummel’s authority to make such interpretations that radically challenged their traditions. Like their Protestant neighbors, Catholic segregationists were also convinced that communist infiltration had inspired the Civil Rights Movement and that organizations like SERINCO and the CHR were directly controlled from Moscow. Catholic segregationists questioned if even Archbishop Rummel had succumbed to communist manipulation.

Attacks on Rummel’s policies escalated following the Brown decision. In October 1955 parishioners at a mission church in nearby Jesuit Bend refused to admit an African-American priest assigned there on temporary duty. In February 1956 representatives in the Louisiana State Legislature threatened to prevent the integration of Catholic schools. In March 1956 a group of prominent New Orleans citizens, including notable segregationist Leander Perez, organized the Association of Catholic Laymen to prevent integration. However, Rummel possessed a powerful means of combating such challenges: excommunication. The archbishop threatened to use the Church’s most extreme sanction against any politician that voted for legislation that interfered in Catholic education. He also threatened to excommunicate members of the Association of Catholic Laymen if the organization did not dissolve. Further, Rummel placed the community of Jesuit Bend under interdict, closing their church and their access to the sacraments. These potent threats worked, with state legislators backing down, the Association of Catholic Laymen disbanding, and even the parishioners of Jesuit Bend offering an apology (albeit a limited one) three years after the Rummel’s interdict. The degree of segregationist agitation, however, forced Rummel to slow to pace of dismantling segregation, with integration not arriving to New Orleans Catholic schools until 1962.

While Rummel’s ecclesiastical authority provided protection against the attacks of Catholic segregationists, the interracial movement among New Orleans students and laypeople did not survive the period of Massive Resistance. The CHR came under attack from segregationists falsely claiming that a presenter at the CHR’s Speakers Bureau was a member of a Communist front organization. State authorities demanded the CHR and Rummel provide the membership list of the organization. As pressure mounted an angry mob protesting the CHR and other civil rights groups burnt a cross on the grounds of the diocesan seminary. Amid this atmosphere of intimidation the CHR disbanded in 1956. SERINCO also dissolved in 1956 after increasing pressure from the administration of Loyola University. Although the interracial movement and its organizations were short lived, Anderson argues the CHR and SERINCO “prepared individuals from the eventual transition from a segregated to an integrated society….Had [these groups survived] Catholic interracialism would have provided leadership and example necessary to produce a new social order.” However, the legacy of these short-lived organizations was “one of…unfillfilled promises.”⁽⁵⁾

Anderson provides a skillful examination of Catholic responses to the challenges of the Civil Rights Movement within the archdiocese of New Orleans. He provides an account that builds on previous works on the Louisiana Freedom Struggle like Adam Fairclough and David Southern.⁽⁶⁾ Anderson’s arguments are grounded in a substantial body of evidence: the organization records of SERINCO and the CHR, numerous interviews with their members, the archives of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, the Jesuit order (utilizing archives in both New Orleans and Rome), and New Orleans’s Catholic colleges and universities. Anderson’s account enriches the literature of the Catholic encounter with the Civil Rights Movement, proving multiple perspectives from the level of the layperson to the archbishop. The only discordant note of Anderson’s account is his attempt in the closing chapter linking the revolt of Catholic laymen supporting segregation with contemporary opposition to Church teachings regarding abortion, birth control, sexuality, and female ordination, claiming that: “[A]ll one has to do is examine this period of history to find the origins of twentieth-century Catholic lay dissent.”⁽⁷⁾ Anderson’s comparison between white supremacy and these contemporary controversies is strained. Nevertheless, Anderson thoroughly and skillfully examines the challenges facing New Orleans Catholics during the early Civil Rights Era.

Another recent addition to the literature of southern Catholicism is Danny Duncan Collum’s Black and Catholic in the Jim Crow South. Collum examines the African-American Catholic community of Natchez, Mississippi, focusing particularly on the era of the Civil Rights Movement. Natchez’s Catholic community has deep roots, with the river city established as the seat of the regional diocese by the Vatican in 1837. Like in New Orleans, Natchez’s black Catholics worshipped alongside whites during the antebellum period and only in 1890 was a separate African-American church established, Holy Family Catholic Church.⁽⁸⁾ Collum utilizes 44 oral histories with members of Holy Family Catholic Church and parochial school to document the church’s role in the African American Freedom Struggle in Natchez.

"For instance, Holy Family's parochial school offered equitable educational opportunities denied to most of Mississippi's black children."

One of the interesting aspects of Collum’s work is the unique status of black Catholics within the variegated racial caste system of the South, living as a minority within a minority. An excerpt from one such oral history is revealing: “It seemed like everybody had a little greater respect for black Catholics, you know. Catholics period, but especially black Catholics. You must be something else if you got two strikes against you—you’re black and you’re Catholic.”⁽⁹⁾ These oral histories and Collum’s account reveal aspects of the class distinctions among Natchez’s African-American community. Founded by lightly-complected African Americans with the support of white patrons, the membership of the Holy Family parish during the early twentieth century reflected the accmodationist and conservative politics identified with Booker T. Washington. Over time Holy Family became an important institution within Natchez’s African-American community, for Catholics and non-Catholics alike. For instance, Holy Family’s parochial school offered equitable educational opportunities denied to most of Mississippi’s black children.

The religious staff of Holy Family Catholic Church hailed mostly from the North and belonged to the Order of St. Joseph of the Sacred Heart, a religious order created in 1871 to minister to African Americans.⁽¹⁰⁾ The white Josephite priests and sisters that served at Holy Family provided an important source of aid and protection for black parishioners enduring racial injustice. Josephite sisters working in the parish’s St. Francis Catholic School possessed a reputation for stern discipline within the classroom, but the oral histories of St. Francis alumni also note the diligence the sisters showed in counseling and assisting their African-American students in applying for college, an ambition other white authority figures discouraged. The various Josephite priests serving in the parish possessed a reputation for fervor in ministering to their black students. According to one oral history, a priest by the name of Father Gaudette acted as an intermediary between Natchez police and African-American students fearful of police brutality. The most influential of Holy Family’s religious staff, however, was Father William Morrissey. A Josephite priest from New York City, Morrissey served as pastor of Holy Family during the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement in Natchez. When black Protestant churches feared firebombing in retaliation for hosting community meetings, Morrissey opened Holy Family to civil rights organizers, even allowing his parish church to serve as the headquarters of the city’s NAACP chapter and serving as the chapter’s vice president. Indeed, Morrissey’s activism crossed the traditional nonpolitical role assumed by Catholic clergy. Morrissey was on the 1964 ballot of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and campaigned for the successful election of Charles Evers, the first black mayor in Mississippi since Reconstruction.

Collum’s selection of oral histories not only describes the era of the Civil Rights Movement, but also the high price paid for this activism. An active chapter of the Ku Klux Klan terrorized Natchez’s black community and NAACP workers in Natchez were assassinated by white supremacists. Collum cites an interview reporting the presence of a chapter of the Deacons for Defense, an organization dedicated to self-protection of  African-American communities and of civil rights organizers. Unfortunately, he does not follow up on what role the Deacons had in the Natchez Freedom Struggle.⁽¹¹⁾ The struggles of black Catholics within Natchez and across Mississippi resulted in the integration of Catholic schools and churches in 1966. Nevertheless, Jim Crow’s demise in Natchez’s Catholic community had bittersweet effects, just as it did for black businesses and institutions across the United States. While segregation fostered bitterness and hatred, the exclusion of African-Americans from white stores, white schools, and white churches also resulted in the creation of African-Americans creating their own businesses, universities, and churches that catered to and were controlled by the black community. The end of segregation created competition among black and white institutions, and not all black institutions survived. Such was the fate of the predominantly African-American parish school, St. Francis, which merged with the white Holy Family school in 1969. The merger ended decades of tradition and marked a moment of transition for the African-American community of Natchez, a transition endured by numerous communities across the nation as the system of Jim Crow was dismantled.

The oral histories presented in Black and Catholic in the Jim Crow South provide a revealing glimpse on the unique experience of black Catholics in the South and how Holy Family parish served as a center for African-American activism against white supremacy. Collum’s analysis and commentary are generally insightful and helpful. However, the absence of any biographical information regarding the selected oral histories is frustrating. Readers are forced to extrapolate on their own the age, race, and gender of those giving testimony. This information would be helpful in providing context to the perspectives of those testifying. Nonetheless, the emotion, sacrifice, and commitment of Natchez’s Catholic community for racial equality are clearly expressed in these oral histories. 

If the first two books under review document the contribution of southern Catholics to the end of Jim Crow, then Amy Koehlinger’s The New Nuns explores how the Civil Rights Movement influenced Catholicism. She examines how members of American female religious orders redefined how to their live out their religious vocations during the Civil Rights era. Koehlinger provides a vivid account of how the reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1963-1965) provided new opportunities for Catholic sisters to move beyond the confines of the cloister and enter the public sphere. Numerous American nuns imbibed the same spirit of activism that defined the Civil Rights era and the decade of the Sixties. These sisters moved beyond the traditional duties of teaching in parochial schools and assisting in church ministries. Catholic sisters organized and administered numerous programs addressing a variety of societal ills: drug addiction, adult illiteracy, and union organization among migrant workers. Many of these programs were among non-Catholic communities where proselytization was not a primary goal, a mandate questioned by some bishops. Further, these programs were not always administered within the confines of the Catholic hierarchy but that of the bureaucracy of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs. Koehlinger argues that the most significant of these new works was a “racial apostolate” among African-American communities in the North and the South.

The women who participated in this racial apostolate came from different monastic communities scattered across the United States. Most sisters were white and few possessed substantial familiarity with the African-American experience. However, the freedom struggles fought across the South motivated these women to make their own contribution to the cause of racial equality. Sisters created social networks and organizations to provide guidance and a placement service for volunteers in the racial apostolate, linking women together from different religious orders for the first time in a common purpose. The works of the racial apostolate took on many forms, many of which Koehlinger painstakingly documents. A number of sisters taught in historically black colleges and universities in order to facilitate sabbaticals for African-American faculty, bringing many nuns into contact with black communities for the first time. Others participated in federal antipoverty programs funded by the Great Society in an attempt to combat the systemic poverty plaguing African-American communities. Other sisters created educational programs for African-American children, like Project Cabrini, a summer “fun school” serving the Cabrini Green public housing development in Chicago. Another group of sisters participating in a project known as Summer in Suburbia (SIS) assisted the process of parish integration by going door- to-door in white neighborhoods to speak with families and speed the process of change through education about racial equality.

Sometimes the sisters reported success, and sometimes their message failed to resonate. One anecdote Koehlinger captures is from a sister in SIS, whose response from a boy in a suburban home in Cleveland when she knocked on the door is unforgettable: “My mother said to say she’s not home. You know what else she said? She said you can go to hell.”⁽¹²⁾ This family aside, the efforts of the racial apostolate contributed to the dramatic changes resulting from the Civil Rights Movement. More importantly, the racial apostolate had a profound impact on how sisters perceived the purpose of their religious vocations.                 

"Koehlinger poignantly provides the testimony of the sisters who witnessed the impact of poverty, abuse, and violence on Selma's black community."

Perhaps the most prominent form of the racial apostolate took place on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement. Koehlinger provides an in-depth examination of the experience of the Sisters of St. Joseph (SSJ), a Rochester-based religious order that ran a mission church, parish school, and hospital serving the African-American community of Selma, Alabama. Even before the Civil Rights Movement flourished in Selma, the northern women serving in the mission were routinely ostracized for associating with blacks. Because of whom they served; the sisters lost their claims to white privilege: Selma’s white citizens referred to them as the “black sisters,” the Ku Klux Klan left threatening messages, and city registrar attempted to block the nuns from voting. However, the inconveniences the SSJ suffered were minor compared to the terror routinely unleashed against Selma’s black residents. Koehlinger poignantly provides the testimony of the sisters who witnessed the impact of poverty, abuse, and violence on Selma’s black community. As the national spotlight centered on Selma in 1965 the SSJ participated behind the scenes to assist civil rights activists. Following the events of “Bloody Sunday” in March 1965, the sisters provided medical assistance to beaten and arrested marchers. The SSJ convent also hosted nuns from across the nation who had come to Selma in response to Martin Luther King’s call for support for Selma’s black community. While members of the SSJ did not participate in the subsequent March on Montgomery, television cameras captured the participation of those visiting nuns that marched alongside King and other activists. The images of these habited nuns marching alongside non-Catholics for racial justice were a stark departure from the traditional ideal of the cloistered religious jumping rope with their Catholic students. The events of Selma clearly heralded the arrival of the new nun.

Koehlinger skillfully describes how the Civil Rights Movement contributed to the transformation of religious life among American sisters, and how the Movement promoted participation in the racial apostolate. Koehlinger also describes the factors that led to the decline of this apostolate. Over time the African-American communities Catholic sisters served became increasingly reluctant to accept their aid. The emergence of the racial apostolate occurred during a moment of transition within the Civil Rights Movement. Koehlinger shows that as the Black Power movement became an increasingly potent perspective within the African American community, the social space allowing white women to maneuver within these communities became increasingly constrained. Further, as the impact of the Second Vatican Council continued to reverberate among American convents, as sisters turned their attention to issues of congregational reform and gender equality within the Church. While community ministry continues as a core mission of many religious orders, the level of activity in the racial apostolate seen during the Civil Rights Movement remains unmatched.

However, the significance of the changes unleashed by this era continues to shape the character of monastic life for Catholic sisters. Koehlinger describes in great detail how the activism and reform that characterized the post-Vatican II era enriched the spiritual lives of thousands of American sisters. However, many of these progressive orders of “new nuns” that most fully embraced the reform spirit of Vatican II have suffered declining memberships over the last three decades; many have shuttered their convent’s doors and others are near closure. While this decline has impacted religious orders across the board, it is the more traditional religious orders reminiscent of the “old nuns” that have maintained stable populations and attracted young novices. Koehlinger fails address what connection, if any, the current state of declining religious vocations among American Catholics has to the reforms inspired by Vatican II and the Civil Rights Movement. This important question, however, is the only absence in a lively account  enriched by Koehlinger’s engaging prose and substantial research. She employs the archival records of the various institutions and religious orders involved in the racial apostolate, as well as 28 interviews with sisters that labored in this apostolate. These interviews provide especially poignant insights into the experiences of these “new nuns.” Koehlinger has produced a study that greatly enriches our understanding of the experience of Catholic religious life and the impact of the Civil Rights Movement on American Catholicism.

These three works contribute to a historiographical trend emphasizing the local contexts of the African-American freedom struggle and a reperiodization of the era into a “Long” Civil Rights Movement stretching before and after most traditional narratives.⁽¹³⁾ These three books also contribute to a growing literature regarding the experience of southern Catholics during the Civil Rights Movement.⁽¹⁴⁾ These studies expose the continuing problem of the construction of southern Catholic identity: whether in New Orleans, Natchez, or Selma, the challenge of the Civil Rights Movement resulted in varied reactions among southern Catholics choosing to fight or defend Jim Crow. These choices divided southern Catholics just as it did among their Protestant neighbors.

The books under review also highlight some distinctive aspects of the southern Catholic encounter with racial justice. Catholic civil rights activists successfully employed the moral and ecclesial authority of priests and nuns to further the demise of Jim Crow in a way Protestant clergy could not. The institutional nature of the Catholic Church as an international organization also is distinctive. The American Catholic Church never experienced the regional schisms that split the national Baptist and Methodist congregations during the nation’s sectional crisis over slavery.⁽¹⁵⁾ The bishops, priests, and nuns ministering in the South thus came from within the region and from across the United States and Europe. These clergy and religious coming from outside the South brought perspectives and theological understandings that sometimes sharply clashed with their southern congregants. Yet, these non-southern Catholics facilitated significant change within the missions, parishes, and dioceses they served. In contrast, southern Protestant congregations remained largely insulated from non-southern influence.

Further opportunities remain for research into the southern Catholic experience.  Danny Duncan Collum’s account of the African-American Catholic community in Natchez is valuable in part because few works address the experience of African-American Catholics. The African-American Catholic experience needs to be further documented. Amy Koehlinger’s work on the “new nuns” prompts the question whether the Civil Rights Movement resulted in similar transformations among Catholic priests. Finally, more work needs to be done at the diocesan and even parish level. As R. Bentley Anderson correctly notes, to understand the Catholic response to the Civil Rights Movement “one must examine each and every diocese and archdiocese.”⁽¹⁶⁾ The three successful books under review hopefully presage future works that will do just that.  

 

Daniel Hutchinson

Doctoral Candidate in History

Florida State University

Volume XII, Table of Contents

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