Troubling the Waters and Shifting Paradigms: Making the Case for Centering Black Nuns in the Fight for Racial and Educational Justice in Twentieth-Century (Catholic) America

African-American nuns are generally not included in historical discussions or analyses of Catholic participation in the black freedom movement until after the formation of the National Black Sisters’ Conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1968. As a result, historians have generally characterized black sisters as apolitical and culturally conservative prior to the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. However, such interpretations ignore the ways in which church protocol and longstanding racial discrimination and segregation actively precluded most black sisters from participating in the public fight for racial justice prior to and in the immediate years after the Second Vatican Council. They also dismiss the historical importance of the leading roles that black sisters played in the fight to dismantle racial barriers in the Church prior to the great black Catholic revolt of the late sixties and seventies.

This paper attempts to “trouble the waters” of histories of Catholic involvement in the struggle for racial justice that ignore black sisters as viable and legitimate historical subjects.  I contend that centering black sisters in the struggle for racial and educational justice in twentieth-century Catholic America radically alters current historical understandings of the nature and chronology of the Church’s interactions with the civil rights movement and the larger black freedom struggle. Not only do black sisters’ diverse efforts in the fight to secure African-American access to Catholic education and religious life during the first half of the twentieth century intersect with the civil rights movement in important, though obscured, ways. But also, black sisters’ severely circumscribed position in the Church and their frequently contentious relationships with white religious men and women active in the black freedom movement demand a serious reconsideration of the nature and politics of white Catholic involvement in the struggle for racial justice in the twentieth century.