Radicals Habits: Unearthing the History of Black Catholic Nuns in the Black Freedom Struggle
Dr. Shannen Dee Williams Addressing the Annual Meeting of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious in Atlanta, GA in 2016. Photo by Michael Alexander/Georgia Bulletin.
By Jaimee A. Swift
Dr. Shannen Williams (she/her/hers) is uncovering the largely hidden history of Black Catholic sisters and their formidable roots, activism and leadership in the Black radical tradition and the Black freedom struggle.
When one thinks of radicalism, more specifically, Black radicalism, the image of a Black Catholic nun is generally not the first visual that comes to mind. And this is exactly what Dr. Shannen Dee Williams wants to undo through her scholarship and research: to combat the erasure of the radical history of Black Catholic sisters by expanding definitions on and what radicalism was, is, and what it can be.
A historian and scholar with research and teaching specializations in African-American history, Black Catholic History, Black women’s religious and political history, the history of the Black freedom struggle, and Black Womanist and feminist thought, Dr. Williams is the Albert R. Lepage Assistant Professor of History at Villanova University. She is completing her first book, “Subversive Habits: The Untold Story of Black Catholic Nuns in the United States,” which is under contract with Duke University Press. Dr. Williams’s work explores and interrogates the rich yet oft-ignored radical politics of Black Catholic sisters laboring and living in the United States, as they fought against racism, sexism, violence, discrimination, and white supremacy in the Catholic Church and wider society. In December of 2014, Dr. Williams, in a guest blog on Patheos, publicly criticized the U.S. Catholic theologians’ statement on racial injustice that initially excluded Black women and girls as victims and opponents of state and vigilante violence.
I spoke with Dr. Williams about what led her to discovering the radicalism of Black Catholic nuns; the critical importance of expanding perspectives and definitions of radicalism; and the historical and contemporary activism of Black Catholic sisters in the United States.
So much of Black women’s political leadership has been quelled, suppressed and thwarted for many reasons. I am curious to know how you became interested in interrogating and uncovering Black Catholic nuns’ radicalism, as it pertains to the Black liberation and freedom struggles?
Shannen Williams (SW): “It was chance, though I think providential serendipity might be the more apt description. I am Catholic. I was baptized into the faith as an infant and raised in the Catholic Church. My mother was actually the first Black woman to graduate from the University of Notre Dame. However, I had no knowledge of the history of Black Catholic sisters in the United States before 2007. I had never seen a Black nun. Moreover, the history of Black female religious life was something that had not been taught in my public or Catholic education. I actually came to the project while in graduate school at Rutgers University, while searching for a paper topic for a seminar in African-American history.”
“I had never seen a Black nun. Moreover, the history of Black female religious life was something that had not been taught in my public or Catholic education.”
“Through micro-filmed editions of Black-owned newspapers, I came upon an article announcing the formation of a Black Power federation of Catholic Nuns at Mount Mercy College, which is now Carlow University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1968. And I said, ‘My goodness, how do I not know about this organization—how did I not know it existed?’ After that, I googled the National Black Sisters’ Conference, the organization founded at Mount Mercy, and learned that it was still active. I also found that the conference’s papers had been archived at Marquette University. I was in the middle of the semester, so I could not get to Milwaukee then. But, I did have a list of sisters’ names. So, I started the project by conducting oral histories. I wrote and called Motherhouses to see if some of the foundresses of the conference were still alive and asked if they would be willing to let me interview them for my paper, which became my dissertation and now is the subject of my first book.”
Sister M. Martin de Porres (Patricia) Grey, Pittsburgh's First Black Religious Sister of Mercy, Leading Delegation from Mount Mercy College in Selma Sympathy Demonstration in Downtown Pittsburgh, PA, 1965; In 1961, Grey had desegregated the order. Courtesy of Dr. Patricia Grey/Dr. Shannen Williams.. Source: Pittsburgh Catholic, March 18, 1965, 1.
When you discovered this history about the radicalism of Black Catholic nuns being a Black Catholic woman, how did you feel when ‘providential serendipity’ led you to unearth these Black radical sisters’ activism, leadership and stories?
SW: “I felt a host of emotions, including anger, but also a lot of fear. My mother was educated in Black Catholic schools in Savannah, Georgia during Jim Crow, and early in my research, I learned that two of the eight historically Black sisterhoods that had been organized in the United States were established in Savannah. Indeed, the foundation of the schools that my mother attended had been laid by those pioneering Black nuns who were subsequently pushed out of the diocese by virulent racism. By the time my mother was in school in the 1950s and 1960s, there were no Black nuns ministering in Savannah. My mother is the legacy of these Black women of God. Yet, the white nuns that educated my mother never taught her about the pioneering Black nuns that helped lay the foundations for the expansion of Savannah’s Black Catholic population. Therefore, I was never taught about them. So, there was certainly that feeling of awe and shock when I first encountered the history of Black nuns. Then there was anger and fear, in part because Black sisters have left a multitude of records documenting their rich history in this country. The oldest Black orders maintain archives. These are women who desegregated Catholic colleges and universities in the era before the Brown v. Board of Education decision. These are women who led schools and in certain cases, led many of the nation’s oldest Catholic institutions open to African-Americans.”
“One cannot tell the story of Black nuns in the United States without confronting the church’s still largely unacknowledged and unreconciled history of slavery, segregation, and exclusion.”
“So I wondered why were these sisters so unknown to me. Why had their history been suppressed in my formal and informal education? And what I came to realize was that the history of Black Catholic sisters in the United States constitutes a “dangerous memory” for the church. One cannot tell the story of Black nuns in the United States without confronting the church’s still largely unacknowledged and unreconciled history of slavery, segregation, and exclusion. When I began interviewing the women who came together to form the National Black Sisters’ Conference after Dr. King’s assassination in 1968, I learned that many had desegregated the nation’s historically white Catholic sisterhoods after World War II. Many had also been deeply impacted by the lynching of Emmett Till and Black civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. These sisters were members of the so-called Till generation. However, they have been overlooked by historians because female religious life has not been discussed or understood as a significant battleground of the Black freedom struggle.”
“The Black nun population in the United States has been marginal––not because there was a dearth of vocations or interest coming from the African-American community–– but because white orders simply would not accept Black candidates on the basis of race. The Church’s slaveholding roots and anti-Black animus—specifically the refusal of white nuns to live on equal terms with Black women––led to the formation of the first Black sisterhoods in the nineteenth century. While the Black orders were able to preserve the vocations of hundreds of Black women and girls rejected admission into white orders, the number of Black vocations to female religious lost to the church due these discrimination policies numbers in the hundreds, if not thousands.”
”Once I became aware of the largely suppressed history of racial segregation and exclusion in female religious life, I set out to document it. That has been my journey for the past 12 years; collecting over 100 oral history interviews with current and former sisters, getting access to previously sealed church records that document the extraordinary lengths that many white congregations wanted to keep Black women and girls out of their ranks, and finding ways to ensure that this history is preserved for generations to come.”
Founding members of the National Black Sisters' Conference at Mount Mercy College (now Carlow University), August of 1968. Courtesy of Dr. Patricia Grey/Dr. Shannen Williams.
You discuss garnering and gaining access and interviews of current and former Black sisters. Can you discuss some of their experiences in regards to the whitewashing of their experiences as Black Catholic nuns and the history of their radicalism?
SW: “The formation of the National Black Sisters’ Conference (NBSC) in 1968 was a watershed moment in the history of female religious life. Never before had Black nuns in any part of the world gathered on a national stage to explicitly protest racism in the Catholic Church. Those gathered believed that Black sisters–as members of the nation’s oldest, largest, and arguably the most influential religious denomination––had a significant contribution to make in the changing Black revolution. In large part, Black sisters’ voices had not been heard––in many cases they had been deliberately silenced. NBSC leaders believed that one way to confront racism and the moral failures of their church in relationship the African-American community was to tell their stories: to document their lived experiences of racism and exclusion within religious life and the church as a whole. They gave interviews and began documenting the history of their foremothers in the church in various outlets, including the Black, Catholic, and mainstream press.”
“When confronted with historical erasure, one of the most radical acts that a person can undertake is to tell the story that was never meant to be told. For me, this is my opportunity to sing for a group of Black church women who have been largely erased from the story of America.”
“Despite their efforts, Black sisters and the longstanding practices of racial segregation and exclusion have been largely written out of (or been grossly misrepresented in) the history of female religious life. In several documented cases, white sisters—individually and collectively—purged archives of materials documenting Black sisters’ existence and efforts in the early American Church. Moreover, Black sisters’ efforts in the twentieth century when the national Black sister population peaked and Black sisters waged their most significant struggles against racism and sexism in the church remained largely unexamined.”
“In many ways, my book is a continuation of the work of the National Black Sisters’ Conference. When confronted with historical erasure, one of the most radical acts that a person can undertake is to tell the story that was never meant to be told. For me, this is my opportunity to sing for a group of Black church women who have been largely erased from the story of America.”
Is there anything in the contemporary that Black sisters are doing to combat racism, sexism, misogynoir, and more?
SW: “Despite their declining numbers, African-American sisters remain among the most outspoken and consistent critics of racism in the U.S. Church. Until her untimely death in 1990, Sister Thea Bowman, a founding member of the National Black Sisters’ Conference and current candidate for Catholic sainthood, was the most influential voice for racial justice in the church of the last quarter of the twentieth century. There are Black sisters involved in the fight for women’s ordination in the Church. Sisters like Cora Marie Billings, Irma Dillard, and Patricia Chappelle have long led the calls for the church to acknowledge and make reparations for its slaveholding and segregated past. Unsurprisingly, Black nuns were also the first representatives of the church to embrace the #BlackLivesMatter movement joining local protests and publishing editorials criticizing the church’s ongoing failure to take racism, police violence, and other forms of structural violence seriously. In 2015, for example, NBSC founding member and Selma march participant Sister Mary Antona Ebo was the only Catholic nun to participate in the Ferguson protests. Sister Desiré Anne-Marie Findlay, who is a Felician Sister of America, has been vocal in her embrace of #BlackLivesMatter. Another young Black woman, who has since left religious life, had been very involved in movement to eradicate police violence in Milwaukee.”
“Unsurprisingly, Black nuns were also the first representatives of the church to embrace the #BlackLivesMatter movement joining local protests and publishing editorials criticizing the church’s ongoing failure to take racism, police violence, and other forms of structural violence seriously.”
“The biggest challenge facing African-American sisters in the twenty-first century is survival. While African-American sisters continue to break monumental barriers in female leadership in the church, the average age of the nations’ African-American sisters are over 65. In the mid-1960s, there were about 1,000 African-American nuns living and laboring in the United States and over 75 percent of them were members of the historically Black sisterhoods. Three of the historically Black sisterhoods from the 1960s are still with us, though the youngest recently moved their motherhouse to Nigeria where Black vocations to religious life are strong. The questions that remain are: are young Black women in the United States still being called to religious life? Are their vocations being adequately nurtured? How are young African and African-American sisters fairing in the contemporary environment? The growing number of African sisters in the United States means that Black female religious life here will likely survive. Some African orders, including one founded by the National Black Sisters’ Conference in Nigeria in the mid-1970s, have sent representatives to the United States to help preserve Black leadership at the nation’s historically African-American Catholic schools in Washington, D.C. and New Orleans. However, racism in female religious life remains a reality and challenge for the church.”
NBSC Founding President Sr. M. Martin De Porres Grey with Dr. Vincent Harding. Courtesy of Dr. Patricia Grey. Source: Black Survival: Past, Present, and Future: The Second Annual Report of the National Black Sisters’ Conference. Pittsburgh: NBSC, 1970.
What does radicalism mean to you in this context of Black women’s religious life?
SW: “For Black women and girls in the United States, embracing the celibate religious state was an inherently political and radical act. In the 15th century, following a series of papal bulls authorizing Portuguese and Spanish invasion of Africa (and later the Americas) and the perpetual enslavement of non-Christian Africans and Native Americans, the Roman Catholic Church became the first global institution to declare that the lives African-descended people and Native Americans did not matter. Not only was the Catholic Church the largest corporate slaveholder in the Americas, but also it created policies barring African-descended and indigenous people from entering religious life solely on the basis of race to ensure their subjugation. Yet, something remarkable, indeed revolutionary, happened in the early nineteenth century. Free African-descended women and girls living and laboring in the U.S. slave south won approval to establish the modern world’s first Roman Catholic sisterhoods for Black people. In a society and church in which most Black people’s bodies were not their own and in which Black people were relegated to the lowest status, these pioneering Black sisters by forced the church to acknowledge the humanity of Black people and declare that their lives did matter in a profound new way.”
“It is important to think about what it means when Black women and girls denied societal protections and the titles of respectability dared to take the habit. In the case of the two oldest Black historically sisterhoods, the Oblate Sisters of Providence, founded in Baltimore, Maryland in 1828 and the Sisters of the Holy Family founded in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1842, these congregations were founded in cities that contained two of the nation’s largest slave markets. What does it mean that these women founded these communities and promoted the education of Black girls in places where Black women were commodified and sexualized on a daily basis? The Oblate Sisters of Providence admitted formally enslaved women (and at least one enslaved woman) into their ranks before the Civil War. We also know that after the Civil War, the Sisters of the Holy Family began to buy property previously associated with what they called the ‘sins of slavery.’ They bought a former slave traders’ pen and turned it into their first school. They also bought a building infamous for hosting many of the city’s “quadroon balls,” where free women of color were expected to find European partners in the sexually exploitative system of plaçage (concubinage). According to the community’s first historian, the place had been a “den of sin.” However, the Holy Family Sisters transformed that building into their motherhouse and St. Mary’s Academy for Young Ladies of Color, New Orleans’ first secondary school for African Americans in the state.”
“In a society and church in which most Black people’s bodies were not their own and in which Black people were relegated to the lowest status, these pioneering Black sisters by forced the church to acknowledge the humanity of Black people and declare that their lives did matter in a profound new way.”
“What has been most revelatory in my research is the fact that many of the nation’s Black nuns over the course of history welcomed and embraced the label of radical. In the 1930s, an Oblate Sister of Providence who reintegrated Catholic University of America in 1933 described herself and the members of her order as “conservative radicals” noting that they found the strategic balance between the radicalism of W.E.B. DuBois and Carter G. Woodson and the conservatism of Booker T. Washington in the fight against white supremacy. Founding members of the National Black Sisters’ Conference also identified themselves as a radical movement in the Church. They characterized embracing the celibate religious state as a radical act of Black liberation. They argued that celibacy freed them to free thousands. They went on public record challenging misogyny within the church and Black power rhetoric that argued that Black women’s primary place in the revolution was through reproduction and motherhood.”
“In my oral history interviews, I was initially shocked when sisters (especially members of the Black sisterhoods) began to tell me that they entered religious life because they wanted to live a “radical” way of life, one that that nurtured Black women’s intellectual genius, their spirituality, and their talents. These are women wanted to serve their own communities through education and a host of other social services but outside the traditional confines of marriage and motherhood. The historical record reveals that Black sisters and their schools were frequent targets of white supremacists who viewed these women and their institutions as threats to the racial and sexual status quo. So, telling Black sisters’ stories allows us to broaden our definitions of radicalism. The journey of Black Catholic sisters in the United States is an overlooked story of the long Black struggle for freedom, dignity, and bodily integrity.”
What does a ‘Black Woman Radical’ mean to you?
SW: “A Black Woman Radical is a woman who is fighting for the total liberation of herself and her community–social, political, economic, and educational. She is someone who understands that one’s humanity and freedom never requires and demands the denial of another person’s humanity and freedom. At the root of the extraordinary journey of the nation’s Black Catholic sisters is a fundamental understanding that racism and exclusion have no place within the Catholic church. These Black women of God believed wholeheartedly in Catholic social teaching and its embrace of universal humanity. Black nuns pushed the church to be truly Catholic and to do what it said it did for all people. Black nuns have not abandoned that fight, and I think that is another core characteristic of Black Women Radicals. In the face of virulent oppression and unholy discrimination, Black radical women keep the faith and persevere.”
You can follow Dr. Shannen Williams on Twitter @BlkNunHistorian.