"Nothing Is Too Good for the Youth of Our Race": Black Nuns and the Struggle for Catholic Education in the Jim Crow South

This paper examines gendered strategies developed and employed by black Catholic sisters in their struggles to evade (and ultimately dismantle) racial segregation and secure African-American access to Catholic education and religious life after the codification of Church canon law in 1917. It argues that black sisters, who labored almost exclusively in the South prior to the Second World War, deployed a unique “politics of anonymity” which enabled them to launch an inconspicuous assault on racial barriers in the U.S. Catholic educational system during the Jim Crow era. As a result, they quietly desegregated several of the nation's Catholic colleges and universities in the era before the Brown decision, earning scores of advanced degrees and securing the accreditation of their schools. A part of a larger study which seeks to restore the Catholic dimension of the modern African-American freedom struggle to the historical narrative, this paper demonstrates how black Catholic sisters, an almost invisible minority in the U.S. Church, laid the critical groundwork that propelled the direct assault on white supremacy and racial segregation in the Church in the post-World War II era.