Authentically Black and Truly Catholic

The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration

Matthew J. Cressler

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781479898121
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Denominazioni cristiane

Explores the contentious debates among Black Catholics about the proper relationship between religious practice and racial identity Chicago has been known as the Black Metropolis. But before the Great Migration, Chicago could have been called the Catholic Metropolis, with its skyline defined by parish spires as well as by industrial smoke stacks and skyscrapers. This book uncovers the intersection of the two. Authentically Black and Truly Catholic traces the developments within the church in Chicago to show how Black Catholic activists in the 1960s and 1970s made Black Catholicism as we know it today. The sweep of the Great Migration brought many Black migrants face-to-face with white missionaries for the first time and transformed the religious landscape of the urban North. The hopes migrants had for their new home met with the desires of missionaries to convert entire neighborhoods. Missionaries and migrants forged fraught relationships with one another and tens of thousands of Black men and women became Catholic in the middle decades of the twentieth century as a result. These Black Catholic converts saved failing parishes by embracing relationships and ritual life that distinguished them from the evangelical churches proliferating around them. They praised the “quiet dignity” of the Latin Mass, while distancing themselves from the gospel choirs, altar calls, and shouts of “amen!” increasingly common in Black evangelical churches. Their unique rituals and relationships came under intense scrutiny in the late 1960s, when a growing group of Black Catholic activists sparked a revolution in U.S. Catholicism. Inspired by both Black Power and Vatican II, they fought for the self-determination of Black parishes and the right to identify as both Black and Catholic. Faced with strong opposition from fellow Black Catholics, activists became missionaries of a sort as they sought to convert their coreligionists to a distinctively Black Catholicism. This book brings to light the complexities of these debates in what became one of the most significant Black Catholic communities in the country, changing the way we view the history of American Catholicism.

1

Migrants and Missionaries

“Foreign Missions” on the South Side of Chicago

Mary Howard and her twin sister Martha arrived in Chicago on a summer Sunday in 1939. Their train ticket on the Illinois Central line had been a high school graduation gift from their father, who already lived in Chicago’s “Black Belt” on the South Side of the city. The twins arrived from New Orleans, not knowing that they would spend the rest of their lives in the Midwestern metropolis. To this point, Mary and Martha’s tale resembled that of countless other African Americans from across the South. Between 1915 and 1970 millions of African Americans “voted with their feet” and left the lynch mobs, debt peonage, and segregated spaces of Jim Crow. For many this journey represented nothing less than an Exodus from the Egyptland of the South. Along with their belongings, migrants carried with them dreams of new futures possible in the urban North. Chicago was among the greatest beneficiaries of these “Great Migrations,” which one author has called “one of the largest and most rapid internal movements of people in history.”1 The Black Belt boomed as thousands of Marys and Marthas arrived each day, with Chicago’s Black population rising from 44,103 in 1910 to 492,000 by the 1950s.

What happened next, though, set Mary and Martha apart in this “Mecca of the migrant mob.”2 As they stepped off the train and onto the platform Mary turned to her father to remind him, “You know we gotta be Catholic, we gotta go to Mass today.” It was a Sunday, and it was a mortal sin to knowingly miss Mass. So before they brought their baggage to their father’s apartment, the sisters needed assurance that there was a church close by. Their anxiety proved unwarranted because there stood a large Catholic church in the heart of the burgeoning “Black Metropolis,” as the South Side was coming to be known. The gray-stoned Italian-Renaissance structure towered over the intersection of 49th Street and Grand Boulevard, just north of Washington Park. Twin bell towers connected the façade of Corpus Christi Catholic church to its three-story rectory and school. Built at the turn of the twentieth century as a monument to the wealth of its Irish parishioners, the parish, like the neighborhood surrounding it, had become predominantly Black by 1939. Not three decades prior the boulevard had been home to upwardly mobile Irish and Jewish Chicagoans.3 Now Corpus Christi sat mere blocks from Black Belt intersections affectionately known as “Negro Heaven” and “the Ivory Coast.”4

A Franciscan friar, wearing the signature brown habit cinched with the white rope of his order, stood outside the church welcoming parishioners and passers-by alike. “Oh, come in, come in,” he called out to Mary and Martha. And so the twins entered Corpus Christi for the first time. This would be their parish home for the rest of their lives. That morning they attended the 10 o’clock High Mass. The service was, of course, performed in Latin but this posed no problem. Mary and Martha had both been educated by the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in New Orleans, an order of women dedicated to work among Native Americans and African Americans. There they had been schooled in Latin since elementary school. Now they found themselves worshipping in what was fast becoming the largest and most significant Black Catholic church in the city. When the friars invited the twins to involve themselves in the life of the parish shortly thereafter, they accepted with enthusiasm. Mary and Martha would be mainstays of the community through the end of the century. “Once we got here,” Mary reflected decades later, “it was just like coming home.”5

Mary and Martha arrived amidst the rise of Black Catholic Chicago. “The rise of Black Catholic Chicago” in this book refers to the emergence of Black Catholics as a significant, albeit small, constituency in Catholic Chicago and the establishment of the institutional infrastructure necessary to sustain them. At the turn of the twentieth century the city’s Black Catholic community numbered just a few hundred people meeting in the basement of a single parish. By 1975 Chicago was home to 80,000 Black Catholics, the second largest Black Catholic population in the country. More Black Catholics lived in 1970s Chicago than in New Orleans or Baltimore, an astonishing fact considering the centuries-long histories of Black Catholic Louisiana and Maryland.6 This remarkable growth paralleled religious-demographic shifts nationwide. The U.S. Black Catholic population grew from under 300,000 to over 900,000 members from 1940 to 1975 (a 208 percent increase) and, in that same period, the Black Catholic center of gravity shifted from the coastal South to the industrial North.7

How and why did this rise occur? The twins’ tale proves instructive for answering this question, though perhaps not how we might expect. The vast majority of migrants did not share Mary and Martha’s Catholic faith. What is more, most members of Corpus Christi had not been Catholic upon arrival. Instead, what is enlightening is the interaction between the twins and the friars on that South Side street. It might have amazed Mary and Martha to discover that this vibrant parish had closed temporarily not a decade earlier. Once a prominent Irish parish, Corpus Christi’s pews emptied in the 1910s and 1920s as more and more African Americans moved to the neighborhood and more and more white Catholics left. The parish the twins entered in 1939 was not peopled primarily by Black Catholics from the historic centers of Black Catholic America, like their native New Orleans, though there were some. Rather, Black converts sustained Corpus Christi, converts who had migrated from Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Alabama, and elsewhere. Priests had baptized nearly two hundred Black children and adults just three months before Mary and Martha’s first visit.8 Corpus Christi was not unique in this regard. On the contrary, it bore a resemblance to most of the parishes that survived the demographic shifts brought by the Great Migrations. (There were many more that did not.) It was a parish born of relationships between Black migrants and Catholic missionaries.

The convergence of southern Black migrants and white Catholic missionaries made the rise of Black Catholic Chicago possible. Beginning with the First World War and accelerating with the Second, African Americans migrated from the rural South to the urban North and West in ever increasing numbers. These Great Migrations have been well documented. Less well known is the fact that they coincided with burgeoning missionary efforts among white Catholic priests, sisters, and laypeople across the country. Missionaries hoped to make the United States Catholic by winning converts to what Catholics considered the “One True Faith.” As the Great Migrations remade the American religious landscape, many missionaries came to the conclusion that their Church’s survival in cities depended on African American converts. In Chicago, as in cities across the country, Catholic missionaries reimagined Black neighborhoods as “foreign mission fields” populated by “heathens” in need of “true religion.” For most Black migrants, their first encounters with Catholics would be shaped by the desires and anxieties of these missionaries. This Catholic missionary commitment to Black migrants proved quite successful. The meeting of missionaries and migrants led to thousands of Black Catholic converts. Yet it also forged a fraught relationship between missionaries of the “One True Faith” and the “heathens” they served, as missionaries imagined Black Protestant migrants. This asymmetry of power between the converters and the converted sat uneasily at the heart of Black Catholic history in the early twentieth century and would spark a revolution in the 1960s and 1970s.

The Great Migrations Remake the Catholic Metropolis

It is impossible to understand Black Catholics in the twentieth century without first accounting for the impact of the Great Migrations. Indeed, it is hard to overestimate the significance the Great Migrations had on American history and culture in the twentieth century. Nearly 8 million African Americans left the South in the twentieth century. Mary and Martha were two among 391,641 Black migrants who left the South in the 1930s alone—and that was a down decade.9 At the start of the century, African Americans were a predominantly rural and southern people, as they had been for their entire history in what became the United States. All that changed in the decades that followed. Less than 740,000 African Americans lived outside the South in 1900, only 8 percent of the national Black population. By 1970, 47 percent of African Americans in the United States lived outside the South, more than 10.6 million.10

The convergence of a number of factors caused these migrations. Northern and Western industrial economies expanded rapidly during the First and Second World Wars at the same time that the agricultural economy of the South collapsed. White and Black southerners alike traveled north and west as a result, in search of better economic opportunities. But African American migrations also represented bold political statements. The solidification of white supremacy through legal segregation and paralegal mob violence in the Jim Crow South motivated the departure of African Americans, many of whom experienced the Great Migrations as an Exodus comparable to the biblical flight of Israelites out of Egypt. This mass movement was not spontaneous or leaderless. Family members explored potential cities prior to the arrival of their kin; ministers arranged for the transportation of entire church communities; newspapers and labor scouts encouraged migration by spreading tales of opportunity in the North. Together these factors contributed to an unprecedented movement of people, even if Black migrants would quickly discover that there was a major discrepancy between their imagining of Chicago as the “Promised Land” and the reality of an increasingly segregated city often hostile to Black migrants.11

Chicago loomed large in the Great Migrations for a variety of reasons. Historian James Grossman points out that while jobs were available in most northern cities, “the decision to go to Chicago, rather than to New York, Detroit, or one of many smaller northern communities” stemmed from a variety of factors that changed over time. The first family members to arrive typically chose Chicago “because of its position at the head of the Illinois Central [Railroad system] and its particularly high visibility in the Black South.”12 Chicago’s renown was due in large part to the fact that the city was home to the Chicago Defender, a Black-owned newspaper that actively and forcefully promoted migration by means of its extensive communication network in Black communities throughout the South. The Defender advertised job opportunities, illustrated the allure of the “Black Metropolis,” and narrated the stark differences between North and South. As a result Chicago came to signify the Great Migrations in a special way.

The rise of Black Catholic Chicago was not just an effect of demographic shifts, however. In order to understand why Catholicism became a live option for Black migrants, we must first identify the ways the Great Migrations transformed African American religious culture across the country. And this story starts before the migrations even began, in the years following Reconstruction’s collapse. Historian John Giggie has demonstrated how, between 1875 and 1915, reform and revival movements swept Black Christian communities in the Mississippi Delta.13 The decades immediately prior to the Great Migrations witnessed tremendous contestation over what it meant to be Black and Christian. A group of young Black Baptists “hoped to refine Black religion in the Delta” and equip coreligionists with the resources requisite for success and respect. Curtailing public religious ecstasy was key to their quest for respectability. “The Progressives,” as they called themselves, “desperately wanted members to resist breaking into spontaneous bouts of shrieking, crying, dancing, hand-clapping, and foot stomping during services.”14 Progressives attempted to reign in what they took to be the emotional excesses of Black religiosity. They hoped to challenge white racist assumptions of the primitivism of African American religiosity at the same time that they aspired to better their social and religious standing in their own Black Baptist communities. In other words, they were invested in what historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham termed the “politics of respectability”—a politics evident years later among Black Catholic converts in Chicago.15

Progressives had their share of critics, though. The most compelling among them were the swelling ranks of Black Holiness and Pentecostal Christians.16 Holiness-Pentecostalism represented a dynamic religious revival that emphasized the necessity of a “second baptism,” known as sanctification, whereby any Christian could be sanctified by the Holy Spirit and cleansed of sin forever. A sanctified Christian received gifts from the Spirit as the apostles once had, including the power to heal illness, to speak in tongues, prophesy, or to exorcise demons. Among the most enduring legacies of the Holiness-Pentecostal movement on Black religious life was its style of worship. In stark juxtaposition to the Progressives, Holiness-Pentecostal Christian worship remained “open to improvisation and spontaneity as men, women, and children reacted to being seized and shaken by the Holy Spirit.”17 The Holiness-Pentecostal movement was uninterested in conforming to the purported “respectability” of modern life, dedicating itself instead to a radical new version of the Christian witness.18

This contestation and transformation of African American religious culture did not remain in the South.19 The religious innovations of the post-Reconstruction South traveled north along the railways with migrants. When Black southern religious culture—Holiness-Pentecostalism in particular—met the exigencies of city life, new urban religious practices emerged in Black Protestant churches in early twentieth-century cities. Wallace Best termed this the “new sacred order in the city.”20 In short, migrants brought with them religious practices rooted in the Black South. Distinctive features of southern Black Christianity, from the religious ecstasy of “the shout” to the distinctive cadence of Black preachers, could now be heard from the streets and in the storefronts of Chicago on any given Sunday.21 By midcentury Black migrants had made the South Side of Chicago famous for the plurality and creativity of its religious communities. Over five hundred churches, temples, storefronts, mosques, and synagogues filled the narrow strip of Black Belt Chicago by 1940. Soon Baptist, Methodist, Holiness, Pentecostal, Jewish, Muslim, and Spiritualist as well as Catholic communities competed for the souls of Black Chicago.22

African American religious communities were not the only ones impacted by the Great Migrations. The migrations fundamentally altered the course of Catholicism in the urban North. When migrants arrived in Chicago, they ente...