Mother Katharine Drexel

by Cheryl C. D. Hughes

  The Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament did not go into southern Louisiana for twenty-two years, but at last Janssens’s successor, Archbishop James H. Blenk, had the perfect lure to entice them there. He pointed out that what was needed most in southern Louisiana was a normal school, or teachers’ college, where young black men and women could study to become teachers. Because of the high level of education that Katharine Drexel insisted her sisters attain, a normal school, or college, was one thing the SBS could achieve that the Sisters of the Holy Family could not.

  Mother Katharine gave her sisters rigorous training, both spiritual and practical, before they were allowed to leave the motherhouse to work in SBS schools and missions. In addition to their spiritual routine and basic housekeeping duties of their regular workday, sisters were also taught the basics of sewing, shoe making and shoe repair, housecleaning, gardening, food preservation, and first aid. Other sisters had more intensive vocational training at the Drexel Institute, founded by Katharine’s uncle, Anthony Drexel. Those destined for the classroom received professional teacher training at a time when such training was relatively new. Mother Katharine engaged Katherine T. Meagher, a graduate of the Normal College in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, to come to the motherhouse to teach the sisters. Meagher taught them psychology, Church history, plane geometry, and methods of teaching; she also supervised their practice teaching in the classroom.

  In the early years of the twentieth century, it was unusual for women to have college degrees, and even most teachers, especially in rural areas, did not have one. The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., to which the Drexel sisters had donated $50,000 in honor of their father, opened the Sisters’ College in 1911 to provide a higher education to sisters in religious congregations during the summer months. Katharine attended the college in the summers of 1911, 1917, 1918, and 1920. Naturally, she also sent her sisters. In 1921, thirty-six of her sisters attended the institution. Catholic University also set up an extension at what would become Xavier University in Louisiana to help nuns attain degrees and certificates needed to be effective teachers at any level between first grade and college. Villanova University, another Catholic university, also created an extension at the SBS motherhouse in Pennsylvania to prepare the novices for service in the order’s schools and missions. In practical virtues as well as in spiritual ones, Katharine always led by example. For someone who had never once set foot in a real schoolroom as a young girl, she led the way by becoming a student in summer school at the Catholic University of America at the age of sixty-two. Even today, sixty-two is a little superannuated for a university student, and it was all but unheard of in Katharine’s day. When the call came to found a college for black students in New Orleans, both she and her sisters were ready. Not only were they well educated, but, between the foundation of Immaculate Mother in 1905 and the opening of what would become Xavier University in 1917, they had also become experienced at creating new institutions, having opened and staffed thirteen other missions and schools in such places as Chicago, New York City, Washington, D.C., St. Louis, Macon, Cincinnati, and Montgomery.

  Three Protestant colleges in New Orleans had been established for blacks after the Civil War: New Orleans University, originally the Methodist Episcopal Union Normal for Negroes; Straight University, sponsored by the American Missionary Association; and the Baptist Leland University. As was the custom in those days, all students, including Catholics, were required to attend the Protestant religious services of the colleges. “Straight University in New Orleans boasts in its catalogue of drawing Catholics from their faith. . . . Of course, young Catholics, boys and girls, go there from want of similar Catholic institutions.”48 There was, additionally, a state-supported land-grant university for black students, Southern University. As the area surrounding Southern University became populated with white middle-class citizens, pressure was put on the state to move the school to a distant location, which it did in 1913.

  Consequently, the vacated campus and buildings of Southern University were put up for sale in 1915. Katharine was approached by a number of priests and laymen and, ultimately, Archbishop Blenk of New Orleans about acquiring the property and establishing a Catholic college for African American students. She made the purchase through Henry McInery, an influential businessman, who bought the property at a public auction for $18,000. When the real purchaser became known, a motion was brought before the New Orleans city council to ban the establishment of a “convent or a school for Negro educational purposes” on the grounds of old Southern University, but it failed.49 The SBS voted a total of $23,000 to purchase Southern University and refurbish the buildings. The university auditorium was to serve as a temporary church for the newly established Blessed Sacrament parish. The SBS voted an additional $12,000 to build the parish church and school, which would be staffed by the Josephite Fathers. The Josephites, of the Society of Saint Joseph, the American branch of the Mill Hill Franciscan Fathers, were dedicated to the service of African Americans and worked closely in Louisiana and elsewhere in the country with Katharine Drexel to further their common mission.50 St. Francis Xavier School served almost five hundred students in its first year in grades seven through twelve. The high school was called Xavier Preparatory School, and its first graduating class in 1916 consisted of twenty-six students. In 1918, the governor of Louisiana signed a bill that allowed Xavier University to award college degrees. The new university grew quickly, and by 1927 had four separate departments, the teachers’ college, college of arts and sciences, premedicine, and the college of pharmacy.

  At a time when official Church teaching prescribed separate sex institutions for men and women, Xavier University was coeducational. When Pope Pius XI issued his 1929 encyclical, The Christian Education of Youth, which expressly disapproved of coeducational institutions for college students, Mother Katharine was concerned enough to turn to the papal legate, Archbishop Pietro Fumasoni-Biondi, for guidance. She was reassured that due to the peculiar circumstance of there being no other higher education available to black students and the need to encourage Catholic marriage among black youths she need not worry about Xavier’s coeducation. While Xavier was indeed a Catholic coeducational university, it was never exclusively Catholic. Students of all faiths, or no faith, were accepted to Xavier. By 1933, it boasted 396 students and a faculty of two Josephite Fathers, twelve Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, and twenty-one laymen and laywomen.

  Mother Agatha Ryan, SBS, the institution’s first president, was clear about the mission of Xavier University. The goals of which she writes are, not surprisingly, both this-worldly and otherworldly.

  The education of little ones is important, as important as the foundation of any structure of beauty, but the philosophical training of youth is most important if permanent covering and protection are to be given those foundations. The missionary must not only convert souls, but he must raise up among the people for whom he labors, leaders of their own flesh and blood who can guide and direct their own in a way that even the missionary is powerless to do. . . . The Sisters firmly believe that from the growing student body would come undoubtedly the race leaders who will do much to mold the opinions of Colored America.

  It is the missioner’s hope that these young men and women[,] deeply imbued themselves with the life giving principles of the Faith of God[,] will strengthen the faith in others and, as lay apostles in their respective fields and professions, carry on the glorious work of extending the kingdom of Christ in the souls of Colored men and women.51

  The influence of Katharine Drexel and the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament through Xavier University cannot be overstated. In 1987, 40 percent of the New Orleans public school teachers were Xavier graduates. Moreover, in New Orleans public schools alone, “four out of six high school principals, seven out of eight junior high school principals and thirty out of forty-two elementary principals” were Xavier graduates.52 The impact of the university was immediately fel
t in the black communities in New Orleans and southern Louisiana. Today there are approximately four thousand students at Xavier, and the university is run by an independent board of directors. Many Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament serve on the board and on the faculty.

  Archbishop Blenk had in mind at least six new parochial schools for African American children when he invited Mother Katharine to settle her sisters in New Orleans, and she quickly fell in with the bishop’s plans. After the purchase of the grounds of Southern University, Mother Katharine wrote to the SBS at the motherhouse in Pennsylvania: “O Sisters! This is a grand field. It is teeming with souls, and all should be Catholic. . . . We could easily use fifty Sisters right here in New Orleans.”53 The order boasted approximately 150 sisters when she wrote that statement.

  Essential to the establishment of the new parishes for black Catholics was the establishment of parish schools to educate their children. From their convent at Xavier University, the sisters fanned out across the city to staff the schools at the new black parishes of “Holy Ghost (1916), St. Louis School (1917), Blessed Sacrament (1918), Corpus Christi (1919), St. Peter Claver (1921), and St. Monica (1924). Sisters from the St. Francis Xavier Convent taught catechism in the various parishes as they were established. When it was possible to start a school, the SBS faculty remained at the [Xavier] Prep[aratory] convent until a convent was built in the new parish, something which often took years.”54 Not only did the SBS staff the schools, but also Drexel money built the churches and the schools and helped pay the salaries of lay teachers.

  Of the six parish schools established and maintained by the sisters, all but one lasted until the latter half of the twentieth century. The order was unable to provide sufficient sisters to maintain all its schools, so in 1933 it withdrew from St. Louis School and turned it over to Holy Ghost sisters. The largest of the New Orleans schools was Corpus Christi. In 1939-1940, 1,133 students were taught by twenty teachers, for a student-teacher ratio of 60 to 1. In 1942 the sisters gave religious instructions to an additional 1,250 public-school children, who attended Corpus Christi in the late afternoon one day a week.55 This was an unusually large school for the SBS. By 1973, declining vocations forced the SBS to withdraw from the Corpus Christi school and the school in the Blessed Sacrament parish. Holy Ghost school lost its sisters in 1989, and St. Peter Claver lost them in 1991.

  St. Monica, which began as a mission from Holy Ghost parish, was able to hold on to its SBS faculty for a few years longer, into the 1990s. At St. Monica, which was in a very poor neighborhood, the sisters organized a social service apostolate in 1978 and ran it out of the rectory garage. The social service center eventually served approximately seventy families on a monthly basis, and regularly provided food boxes for ninety senior citizens. The center kept in daily telephone contact with over two hundred people, and it provided emergency services to those without food or shelter. This type of outreach was typical of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, while at the same time they maintained their educational emphasis. In some ways, the success of the SBS was also the cause of its decline in New Orleans. The pattern was for Katharine Drexel’s order to build and staff parishes and schools and then to turn them over to other orders of sisters or to lay faculty, while the SBS moved on to establish other schools in new or developing parishes somewhere else. From New Orleans, Katharine moved her sisters into rural southern Louisiana, where she established more than twenty schools. In most cases, she would provide two sisters to open the school and hire Xavier graduates as lay teachers. It was an ingenious system that provided employment for Xavier graduates and brought educational opportunities to rural blacks, where few or none had existed before. One of the rural black parish schools established by the SBS was St. Edward’s. In 1968, a writer in the St. Edward’s jubilee book noted of Mother Katharine, “No one will ever know the influence this one woman has had on the development — intellectual, spiritual, and otherwise — of the Colored People in Southwest Louisiana.”56

  As an order, the sisters were able to do so much for Native Americans and African Americans because of Katharine Drexel’s large income, but her funds were seriously compromised with the introduction of a federal income tax in 1913. She paid an average of $10,000 a year in federal taxes until 1917, when a graduated income tax schedule was established that placed her income in the highest bracket. In 1918, she owed over $77,000 in federal taxes, while in 1921, approximately 50 percent of her income went to taxes. From 1917 to 1924, she paid almost $800,000 in taxes, while distributing $1.5 million to the missions and schools. Her brother-in-law, Walter Smith, convinced her to seek a tax exemption. As part of the petition to Congress, she pointed out that in the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament “fewer than fifteen percent of the houses [convents] were self-supporting. The congregation was . . . relieving the public of over 15,000 dependents annually . . . employed ‘211 salaried lay teachers and 89 salaried lay service people, . . . erected buildings worth $2.5 million. . . . The Sisters contributed $54,000 annually to the support of Indian and Colored children in schools outside our own.’ ”57 With the help of Senator George Pepper of Pennsylvania, Congress passed an amendment to the Internal Revenue Code that exempted from taxation income expended “for religious, charitable, scientific, literary, and educational purposes . . . if in the taxable year and in each of the ten preceding taxable years the amount . . . exceeded ninety percent of the taxpayer’s net income for each year.”58 At the time, Katharine Drexel was the only person in the United States to benefit from the amendment. The newspapers labeled it the “Millionaire Nun Exemption.” Katharine tried through the courts and Congress to make the exemption retroactive to the establishment of the tax code so as to gain a refund of the taxes she had previously paid. She lost in the courts, and in 1933 Congress nearly removed her exemption altogether. No tax refund would be forthcoming. It was a battle she could not win. To make matters worse for the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, Mother Katharine’s income diminished by about 35 percent during the Great Depression.59

  Social Justice/Social Action in the 1930s

  Katharine Drexel put her name, resources, and the prestige of the SBS behind the growing movement to grant social justice to African Americans. In 1934, she joined the American Scottsboro Committee for the legal defense of the “Scottsboro Boys,” nine black men between the ages of thirteen and nineteen who were tried and convicted of raping two white women. Eight of the men were condemned to death for the crime. Because they had been denied legal counsel, they were granted a second trial, where another all-white jury found them guilty, even though one of the alleged victims repudiated her previous testimony and denied the charge. Mother Drexel wrote to the president of the United States about the case and urged her sisters to write as well.

  They also supported the National American Association of Colored People (NAACP) and were active in its antilynching campaign. In addition to aiding the NAACP financially, she and her sisters wrote letters to the president and to congressmen in all the districts where they had missions. Walter White, the first executive secretary of the NAACP, wrote this about Katharine Drexel and Catholic support for the organization:

  With the main body of Catholic opinion behind our efforts, along with assistance already given by other groups, our [antilynching] contest would be brief and successful. I am happy to tell you of the considerable aid given by Mother Katherine Drexel and her sister, Mrs. Louise Morrell, in this issue. They have also rendered valuable assistance in the work of Negro education and in the relief of Negroes in the area of the levee control project on the Mississippi. Mother Katherine’s flaming spirit is a great inspiration to all of us who are working for the welfare of the Negro group in America.60

  White visited Mother Katharine at the motherhouse to solicit her advice, help, and, of course, funding for the NAACP campaign for the black workers engaged in the Mississippi River Flood Project. Workers were building levees along the Mississippi, which had flooded its ban
ks in 1927 and caused great destruction. The Army Corps of Engineers designed a system of levees to control future floods. Contract workers were housed and fed by local people in conditions that, according to Lynch, approached slavery. There were “70-100 hour work weeks, and various charges against wages that left the men ten cents an hour, an amount that was often kept from them.”61 Because of pressure from the NAACP, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, and many others, conditions improved. “You and Mrs. Morrell through your generous contribution for this fight have given hope and opportunity to some 35,000 Negroes employed on this project. On their behalf and ours may I once again express our deep gratitude.” He went on to regret that she would not “let the public at large know to whom we are indebted for the great accomplishment in getting decent working conditions and adequate wages for 35,000 workers.”62

  Unique for the sisters was their mission in Boston, because it was not centered on a school. Rather, it was a mission of social outreach to the local black community. Begun in 1914, it grew rapidly. The sisters there made more than 13,000 home visitations in 1924, in addition to their catechism classes for children and adults and preparation for the sacraments. By 1935, the order had built a large mission center in the Roxbury district of Boston. They averaged seventy-five to eighty conversions a year to the Catholic faith. They visited prisons, and during World War II they gave catechism classes to black conscientious objectors at the Miles Standish labor camp in Carver, Massachusetts.63 In Boston, the SBS played the role of social workers who were also, and mainly, interested in the spiritual welfare of their clients.

  In a social outreach of a different type, Mother Katharine and her sisters helped Father Sylvester Eisenman found the Oblate Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, an order of Native American sisters, in 1935. The Oblates opened a mission outside of Marty, South Dakota. The SBS had staffed the mission at Marty after its inception in 1922, and the SBS encouraged and financially supported the new Indian order of sisters, supplying its first mistress of novices. The Oblates named themselves after the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in honor and appreciation of Katharine Drexel. The founding of this order of nuns confirmed Mother Katharine’s belief in education as a means of uplifting not merely individuals, but whole peoples.