Integrating the Suburbs: Black Catholic Pioneers and the Debate over Religion in the Public Sphere

In post-war America, white Protestants, Catholics, and Jews took advantage of new governmental programs to move from the city to the suburbs.  Their relocation happened in the context of a peak in America’s religiosity.  In the urban north, where housing served as the lynchpin of racial hierarches, middle-class African Americans also sought to take advantage of the suburbs.  In the Chicago area, often the first black family to purchase a home in a neighboring suburb was Catholic.  Middle class and upwardly mobile, the family not only had the money to move out of the city, but also had the hope of a parish community that, at least in theory, had to welcome them because they too were members of the universal church.  Catholic interracial organizations, committed to integration and racial justice, partnered with liberal Protestants and Jews in attempts to smooth the way for the families to peacefully integrate the suburbs. 

This paper places Catholicism at the center of the discussions, debates, and disagreements over suburban integration.  The movement of black people to white suburbs raised the question of the role of religion in the public sphere, and indeed, even what constituted the public sphere.  Should religion be confined to one’s own home, and not affect how one received a new neighbor?  Or did religion have something to say about black people’s access to the suburbs?  White people opposed to suburban integration drew on Southern segregationist religion and a rhetoric of privatized faith that argued that religion had little to do with whom one accepted as one’s neighbor.   Black suburban homeowners and their supporters argued that religion – whether it was Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish – should shaped white people’s responses to their new neighbors.