by Tanner Colby
After the war, the emancipation of 4.6 million slaves presented what one Catholic bishop bluntly described as “a golden opportunity for reaping a harvest of souls.” Northern Protestant missionaries, black and white, flooded south to build churches and schools. But because white ministers had been deployed to constrain blacks before, given the choice, the freedmen instinctively flocked to their own. The invisible church became visible. The AME denomination added fifty thousand new adherents in less than a year. Baptist churches, being independent from any centralized authority, sprouted up anywhere a preacher chose to hang out his shingle. Hundreds of them grew out of the Southern grassroots, eventually organizing under the National Baptist Convention in 1895, which would go on to become the largest black religious institution in the country. A sprawling constellation of other black Protestant denominations would soon emerge as well, in the way that Protestant denominations always do. Despite this golden opportunity for reaping a harvest, however, the number of former slaves who ran for the embrace of the Roman Catholic Church would turn out to be practically zero.
The Catholics might have done better for themselves. They were, after all, one of the first major Christian denominations to categorically reverse their stance on slavery, having done so in 1839. The Church of Rome was also the only major religion that didn’t break along sectional lines during the Civil War. Technically, it couldn’t. It’s one church—the One True Church, if you believe the marketing brochure. This idea stems from the principle of the Mystical Body of Christ, which holds that the Holy Roman Catholic Church is the physical manifestation of the body of Christ on earth, with Jesus as its head in heaven.* The dictionary definition of “catholic” is “universal in reach; involving all.”
While the church did look upon blacks with a paternalistic noblesse oblige, it was rare that Catholic priests actually used their pulpits to promulgate a segregationist theology—a segregated Catholicism is a contradiction in terms. Being true to its principles, the Catholic Church should have offered blacks a refuge from Jim Crow at the start. But Catholics had a problem of their own: Protestants. Anti-Catholic prejudice among America’s Protestants was pervasive; in the South, Catholics were routinely vilified and threatened by the Ku Klux Klan. And so as Jim Crow began to take root, Catholic priests and bishops mostly remained silent. To do otherwise would have invited unwelcome attention. Segregation was a political matter, the church decided. But in accommodating the Protestant power structure of the South, the Catholic Church would have to conform to it, mimic it, and ultimately become indistinguishable from it. Where Southern Protestant churches actively evangelized a segregationist doctrine, the Catholic Church tacitly condoned and camouflaged itself in that doctrine, fully knowing that this violated its core beliefs.
In Maryland (a Catholic colony) and in Louisiana (formerly under French and Spanish—i.e., Catholic—rule), the church had built and nurtured a significant black following. But to send priests into the Deep South after the war would have been to send them into hostile, possibly deadly territory. And converting a nation of black Catholics would saddle them with the problem of having to integrate black Catholics and white Catholics into the One True Church. The solution to this was simple: don’t convert any more black Catholics.
As Protestant missionaries raced into the former Confederacy, the papists stayed home. Twice, in 1866 and in 1884, the Vatican ordered American bishops to come up with a plan to bring the former slaves into the Catholic fold. On both occasions, the bishops convened a national council, talked, and voted to sit on their hands. An invitation was extended to European missionaries to come and work in the South if they wanted to. Some did. But the only major initiative undertaken by the American church was to pass the hat: once a year on the first Sunday of Lent, a collection was to be taken up to support a special commission on Indians and Negroes. That the church would file the Negro in the same drawer as the Indian tells you exactly how much of a priority they were. By the time the Catholics even thought to do something about expanding their black ministry, the Methodists and the Baptists had already run the board. Today, fewer than 2 percent of black Americans are Roman Catholic.
Though the church’s negligence is in large part to blame for this, outside of those areas where blacks were already steeped in the Roman tradition, it’s debatable how much success Catholic missionaries would have had among the freedmen. Since white clergy had been used to suppress black spirituality under slavery, the top-down, white-run, authoritarian orthodoxy of Catholicism held little appeal for many of the newly emancipated. The Do It Yourself ethos of Protestantism, on the other hand, would prove to be an ideal fit for the century to come.
Under Jim Crow, America made it abundantly clear that blacks would be categorically barred from nearly every civic and social institution in the country, from schools to hospitals to the Rotary Club. The black church would step in to fill virtually all of those roles. In many black communities, the church house was also the schoolhouse, the meetinghouse, and the music hall. Social clubs, death and burial societies, fraternal organizations, black-owned banks and insurance companies, historically black colleges—like spokes on a wheel, they all radiated out from Sunday morning at eleven o’clock.
The church would become the single greatest source of black America’s strength, but that would also make it the deepest and most enduring root of its separateness. Though Martin Luther King obviously advocated for the black church, he openly struggled with the paradox it represented, calling it the “so-called” Negro church because “ideally there can be no Negro or white church.” Their separation was an accident of history, a crime first perpetrated by whites and now perpetuated by vested interests on both sides.
In all the newsreel footage of gospel-singing freedom marches, one sees the black church as the most righteous and upright institution in the cause of integration and civil rights. It was and it wasn’t. There was the ugly side of it, too. As King’s crusade gathered momentum, the president of the National Baptist Convention was one Reverend J. H. Jackson of Chicago’s Olivet Baptist Church—“the Negro Pope,” he was called, for his tenure and his grip on power were that absolute. Jackson always gets left out of the feel-good Black History Month highlight reels, because from the pulpit of the largest, most powerful black religious institution in the country, he denounced the civil rights crusaders as “hoodlums” and “criminals.” They threatened to usurp the system on which his power was predicated.
At the National Baptist Convention’s annual conference in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1961, King attempted to dethrone Jackson’s presidency by gathering a pro–civil rights coalition to back an opposition candidate, Reverend Gardner Taylor of New York. When King’s insurgent delegation tried to challenge Jackson’s loyalists on the convention floor, a riot broke out among the twenty-five hundred clergymen there in the meeting hall. One preacher was trampled to death. Jackson called in the police to suppress the insurrection, saw to it that King’s delegation was removed from the convention, and then had himself reelected through an uncontested and illegitimate ballot. His position secured, Jackson stripped King of his office and title in the National Baptist Convention and publicly accused the civil rights leader of being responsible for the death of the preacher who’d been killed. King and his pro–civil rights allies were excommunicated, and had to form their own splinter group, the Progressive National Baptist Convention. Under J. H. Jackson’s continued rule, the nation’s largest black religious organization spent the rest of the 1960s publicly and spitefully opposed to any and all endeavors of Martin Luther King, Jr.
It was during the Lenten season of 1963 that Martin Luther King brought his civil rights campaign to Birmingham, Alabama. His reasoning was more secular than spiritual: an organized boycott of the department stores during the Easter shopping season would have the greatest financial impact. Still, it wasn’t long before religion became a flash point of the confrontation. The stores being picketed were owned by Jewish businessmen, dismaye
d to find themselves directly in the line of fire. One Jewish community leader was prompted to write that their businesses should be left out of the whole affair. This civil rights issue wasn’t really a black and white problem, he said. It was a Christian problem. He wasn’t entirely wrong.
It is certainly no coincidence that the most segregated city in America is where all of America’s Christian problems came crashing into one another. Birmingham is where Protestant nativists exploited anti-Catholic hatred to drive George Ward from power in 1917, paving the way for an increasingly repressive system of Jim Crow. It’s where Martin Luther King had to contend not just with segregationist preachers, but also with those local black leaders who resented his intrusion, called him an outsider, and lobbied to put the brakes on his boycott, lest it disrupt the cozy and lucrative niche they’d built by accommodating the white power structure. And as the 1963 confrontation approached, while black demonstrators were organizing and praying at Sixteenth Street Baptist, the Ku Klux Klan was plotting its bloody retribution in the basement of Highlands United Methodist.
On the day the demonstrations were to commence, the leaders of Alabama’s white churches issued an open letter to Birmingham’s black community. Entitled “A Call for Unity,” the letter urged blacks to stay home, not make trouble, and wait for the issue of segregation to be settled in the courts. “A Call for Unity” was published on April 12, Good Friday. Which, apparently, is not the proper occasion for Christians to make a sacrifice in the name of justice.
But the protesters marched on Good Friday nonetheless, and Martin Luther King was arrested and jailed that same morning. Just four days later, on April 16, King released his now famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Mostly remembered as a general treatise on nonviolent civil disobedience, the letter was in fact written as a direct response to the eight ministers responsible for “A Call for Unity,” politely but firmly calling them out for their cowardice. Instead of setting the moral standard that society should follow, King argued, the church had been content to accommodate the immoral status quo. Too many religious leaders had “remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows.” In the midst of injustice, white preachers stood “on the sideline” mouthing “pious irrelevancies” and “sanctimonious trivialities.” In the great moral crisis of its time, the white church had done nothing.
In Grand Coteau, to Wallace Belson, the white church had done far worse than that.
* “We were all baptized by one Spirit into one body,” 1 Corinthians 12:13; Christ “is the head of the body, the church,” Colossians 1:18.
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The Strange Career of Jesus Christ
The story of how Jim Crow came to America and the story of how Jim Crow came to the Catholic Church are one and the same. They both start in Louisiana. So did I. Before I moved to Birmingham, I grew up in the city of Lafayette, the largest of Acadiana’s small towns. The social life we had as kids grew almost entirely out of the families we met at St. Mary’s Church, and everyone we met at St. Mary’s was white. Lafayette’s black Catholics were over at Immaculate Heart on the north side of town, separated from us by a big set of train tracks and a hundred years of bad ideas.
As much as we talk about the importance of “diversity” in our schools and workplaces, the notion of integrating the church is the last thing anyone, black or white, seems willing to put on the table. So much as broach the topic, and a chorus of voices will rise up to tell you it cannot be done. It’s impossible. But if you want to talk about how and where relationships are made, if you want to change the way the social fabric is stitched together—particularly in a small town, and especially in the South—you have to start with the man on the cross.
The tragedy of Louisiana is that, in an alternate universe, this is where the interracial ideal of the One True Church might have found its greatest expression. The Franco-Anglo-Afro-Iberian-Caribbean melting pot that exists there brewed a very different ethnic stew than you’ll find anywhere else in America. You had the landowning, slave-owning whites, but you also had the swamp-dwelling, French-speaking Cajuns, who weren’t considered white at all. You had black slaves, free blacks who were Caribbean born, free blacks who were European born, a large mixed-race Creole population—which didn’t consider itself black—and on top of that you had people with every shade of skin tone in between, many of whom passed themselves off as any or none of the above.
Before the Civil War, New Orleans was home to more than eleven thousand free people of color. In 1869, the state established the only integrated public school system in the South. The following year, it legalized interracial marriage. By the end of Reconstruction, Louisiana’s black and Creole populations had produced a number of successful businessmen, not to mention thirty-two state senators, ninety-five state representatives, two parish judges, four mayors, and three lieutenant governors—one of whom served briefly as acting governor.
On top of which: everyone in southern Louisiana is Catholic. It’s like a humid Ireland with better food. Acadiana in particular is one of the most populous Catholic regions in the country. Today, there are more than 331,000 of the faithful, making up nearly 60 percent of the total population. Within that, Acadiana has the highest proportional representation of black Catholics anywhere in America, over one in five. Given those demographics, and given an alleged commitment to the Mystical Body of Christ, all those fine, churchgoing folk ought to be joined together as one, united in an unbreakable covenant ordained by Heaven above.
And yet, Wallace Belson.
The fact that Wallace Belson was assaulted in Grand Coteau’s “white” church is especially curious when you consider that black and white Catholics in Louisiana had for many years gone to church together. In New Orleans, records dating back to the 1720s show free people of color getting married at otherwise “white” parishes; blacks sat in and among the main congregation and joined integrated choirs, too. Outside of New Orleans things were not quite as cosmopolitan. In rural parishes, colored parishioners typically sat in separate pews at the rear or on the side of the church. They also had to go to communion last, after whites. And in no parish were people of color allowed to participate in the liturgy; they could not become priests or hold any meaningful position in the church hierarchy.
By 1890, thirteen years after the end of Reconstruction, blacks’ relatively higher standing in Louisiana had begun to deteriorate. That summer, two major questions came before the state legislature. The more divisive issue was whether to renew the license of the Louisiana Lottery Company, which for twenty-five years had operated a statewide gambling lottery. Up at the statehouse, leading the antilottery faction was senate president Murphy Foster. He was determined to see gambling outlawed, only he lacked a voting majority. The prolottery faction was expected to carry the day; included in that group were all of Louisiana’s black senators, as the game was a popular entertainment among their constituents.
Far less important was the Separate Car Act, which intended to mandate separate railcars for colored passengers. Similar ordinances were already in place in Tennessee and Mississippi, but their passage in Louisiana was not yet guaranteed. The act had passed in the house, but when it came to the senate it just sat, deliberately bottled up in committee. Many senators hoped it would die there. As was true across the South, some whites saw Jim Crow laws as unnecessary, no matter their personal feelings about blacks. One white senator objected to the Separate Car Act on the grounds that if we were going to start cordoning each other off by race, the proposed legislation did nothing to insulate him from white trash and Chinese—“both more obnoxious than many colored persons.”
Then, the senate voted to extend the license of the Louisiana Lottery Company; it was an embarrassing loss for the antigambling faction. A vindictive Senate President Foster pulled the Separate Car Act out of committee and put it on the floor for a vote—for the sole purpose of using it as leverage to change the votes of the prolottery blacks. It didn’t work. On July
8, the senate voted down the Separate Car Act. It was all but dead. Forty-eight hours later, however, the antigambling coalition had exercised every last legislative option to try to ban the lottery. They had come up empty, and angry. And so, one antigambling senator, who himself had initially voted against the Separate Car Act, brought it back to the floor again, changing his vote to yea. And by the time the antigambling whites put the screws to all the undecideds, they had a majority. On July 10, 1890, the Separate Car Act passed and was signed into law—not because of overwhelming popular demand, but mostly as a petty get-back against a handful of black politicians over some stuff that didn’t have anything to do with anything.
In New Orleans, Homer Plessy and the Comité des Citoyens mounted a legal challenge to the law, took that challenge to the Supreme Court, and lost. Now protected by the Constitution, Jim Crow’s slow creep across the South began to accelerate. Louisiana’s multihued melting pot began sorting itself into ever stricter definitions of “black” and “white.” Antimiscegenation laws overturned two decades of interracial marriage. Literacy and property requirements cut the number of enfranchised blacks from 130,344 to 5,320 in a single year. And by the mid-1890s, having snuck into the railcar, the bedroom, and the voting booth, Jim Crow finally came knocking at the door of the One True Church.
Before the Separate Car Act had passed, the Archdiocese of New Orleans* had no desire to expunge people of color from its existing integrated churches. Local priests were particularly opposed to the idea. They knew well what was true then and is true now: blacks put more in the collection plate than whites. Louisiana’s people of color were dedicated and valuable parishioners—unlike white Europeans who, as one priest put it, “are as stingy here as they are in their own country.” And at the time, the Archdiocese needed all the Sunday offerings it could get; a string of bad property investments in the 1870s had left it teetering on bankruptcy. The church’s position was clear. “Separate and distinct parishes are not advisable,” it said in a statement in 1888.
