Black and Catholic? Debating Black Power and the Black Catholic Movement, 1968–84

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a number of black Catholics embraced Black Power and severely criticized the Catholic Church as a “white racist institution.”  They believed that the Church’s only hope for salvation was to welcome “authentically black” politics and practices.  This impulse, which came to be known as “the Black Catholic Movement,” manifested in local protests as well as national institutions.  By the 1980s, this movement had come to define black Catholic identity in the United States.  African American Catholics were not univocal on the subject, however.  Black Power Catholics argued that African American Catholics who refused to embrace their new modes of worship were “black-faced white people.”  Meanwhile, many more African American Catholics were frustrated with what they took to be “separatism” and they worried about being labeled “Uncle Toms” if they dissented.  Some African American Catholics spoke out sharply against the Black Catholic Movement, rejecting all that “black stuff” preached from the pulpit.  This debate between African American Catholics about what it meant to be black and Catholic in the United States illuminates the fundamental diversity of African American religious communities.  Scholars tend to assume the unanimity of black identity, the ubiquity of black activism, and the uniformity of black religious life.  My paper will highlight profound disagreements among African American Catholics.  Pivoting between the Black Catholic Movement locally in Chicago and nationally, I will demonstrate how some of the fiercest opposition the Black Catholic Movement faced in its mission to promote an “authentically black and truly Catholic” religious life was from black Catholics themselves.  Ultimately, from 1968 through 1984, African American Catholics argued with each other about whether it was even possible to be both black and Catholic, and what that would look like politically and liturgically, culturally and theologically.