Subversive Habits

Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle

Shannen Dee Williams

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781478018209, 9781478015574
• eBook ISBN: 9781478022817
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations
• Index: Social Sciences

In Subversive Habits, Shannen Dee Williams provides the first full history of Black Catholic nuns in the United States, hailing them as the forgotten prophets of Catholicism and democracy. Drawing on oral histories and previously sealed Church records, Williams demonstrates how master narratives of women's religious life and Catholic commitments to racial and gender justice fundamentally change when the lives and experiences of African American nuns are taken seriously. For Black Catholic women and girls, embracing the celibate religious state constituted a radical act of resistance to white supremacy and the sexual terrorism built into chattel slavery and segregation. Williams shows how Black sisters—such as Sister Mary Antona Ebo, who was the only Black member of the inaugural delegation of Catholic sisters to travel to Selma, Alabama, and join the Black voting rights marches of 1965—were pioneering religious leaders, educators, healthcare professionals, desegregation foot soldiers, Black Power activists, and womanist theologians. In the process, Williams calls attention to Catholic women's religious life as a stronghold of white supremacy and racial segregation—and thus an important battleground in the long African American freedom struggle.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Note on Terminology
• Preface: Bearing Witness to a Silenced Past
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. America’s Forgotten Black Freedom Fighters
• 1. “Our Sole Wish Is to Do the Will of God”: The Early Struggles of Black Catholic Sisters in the United States
• 2. “Nothing Is Too Good for the Youth of Our Race”: The Fight for Black-Administered Catholic Education during Jim Crow
• 3. “Is the Order Catholic Enough?”: The Struggle to Desegregate White Sisterhoods after World War II
• 4. “I Was Fired Up to Go to Selma”: Black Sisters, the Second Vatican Council, and the Fight for Civil Rights
• 5. “Liberation Is Our First Priority”: Black Nuns and Black Power
• 6. “No Schools, No Churches!”: The Fight to Save Black Catholic Education in the 1970s
• 7. “The Future of the Black Catholic Nun Is Dubious”: African American Sisters in the Age of Church Decline
• Conclusion. “The Catholic Church Wouldn’t Be Catholic If It Wasn’t for Us”
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index