Ecumenical Christianity and Racial Liberalism in 1950s Chicago

This paper considers the intersections of ecumenical Christianity and racial liberalism in 1950s Chicago. In particular, it builds on recent insights by scholars of Catholic Inter-racialism and urban working-class religion of the post-WWII urban U.S. It will examine the activities of members of the Chicago Chapter of the Catholic Interracial Council who worked with civil rights leaders like Bayard Rustin against white urban violence. These ecumenical collaborations were significant since in the early 1950s, Rustin was a member of the American Friends Service Committee – a liberal organization of the Quakers. Likewise, it will chart other connections between Catholic liberals and labor activists over the same period in relation to promoting diverse working-class communities in the Back of the Yards district of Chicago’s Southside alongside Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation. Furthermore, it will conclude that the Chicago Conference on Religion and Race in 1963 marked a culmination of such ecumenical efforts which extended across both Christian denominations and non-Christian religions (notably Judaism). That this took place in Chicago suggests the city was a strategic laboratory for such ecumenical exchanges and considerations at the height of Civil Rights Era America.

That these ecumenical efforts between interracialists, civil rights, and labor activists also took place before and on the cusp of the Catholic Churches deliberations at Vatican II in the early-mid 1960s suggests that more needs to be understood about not only interracial but ecumenical cooperation in relation to liberal calls for social justice in various forms. These collaborations and exchanges are important to understand because they took place during an early Cold War period ostensibly characterized as repressive, fragmentary, and illiberal over the middle decades of the 20th Century.