Black Catholics and Black Power: Racial Justice and the Question of Catholic Distinctiveness in Chicago, 1968

In 1968, a group of six black police officers and a Black Catholic priest founded the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League (AAPL) on the south side of Chicago in an attempt to increase the African American presence in the city’s police and to seek justice for black victims of police brutality.  Fearing reprisal from the predominantly white Chicago police force, the six young officers met secretly in the basement of Holy Angels Catholic Church with Father George Clements, a priest who soon found himself serving as the de facto chaplain of Chicago’s Black Panther Party and embroiled in a number of controversies in the Chicago Church—ranging from challenging the Archdiocese to assign more black pastors to the installation of a St. Martin Luther King, Jr. shrine in his parish.  Interestingly, the Black Catholic connection in the AAPL ran even deeper than Clements.  The cofounder and president Renault Robinson as well as U.S. Representative Ralph Metcalfe, one of the AAPL’s most prominent supporters, were not only Black Catholics; they also traced their roots back to the same black parish in Bronzeville, Corpus Christi, that Fr. Clements had attended.  Histories of American Catholics in the long civil rights era tend to emphasize the lineage of liberal Catholic integrationism that diminished toward the end of the 1960s.  However, Father Clements, Renault Robinson, and the AAPL may offer an example of a different kind of Catholic engagement with racial justice, indicating a connection between Black Power politics and the emergence of a particular expression of Black Catholic identity.  In this paper I will examine the AAPL in order to understand whether there was something distinctively Catholic about the ways these African Americans joined in and engaged with the broader Black Power movement in Chicago in the late 1960s and early 1970s.