Already by the 1920s southern missionaries described an exodus of African-Americans from the region. A Savannah, Georgia, priest wrote that his parishioners "go to New York and to Chicago to what they think is a better standard of social life." From Pass Christian, Mississippi, came word that "many young folks and some old ones leave for the larger cities in the North, especially Chicago." Three-quarters of one Harlem parochial school class raised their hands when asked if they had been born in the South, and one New York pastor estimated that "about 75 percent of our Negro [Catholic] population is American, principally from the seaboard states, the other 25 percent is from the islands and West Indies." A Josephite priest summarized the situation in 1929. "[T]he sudden and abnormal increase in the Negro population creates a new situation demanding the immediate attention of Church authorities."
What was to become of these migrants once they reached their destination? Early treatments of the question in Catholic circles framed it as a traditional immigration matter. African-American Catholics, like Poles, Italians, and other Euro-American groups, were expected to worship in their own parishes, receive the ministrations of religious-order priests specially trained for work in their community, and learn from nuns who were devoted to working in their parochial schools. Supporting the logic of this ethnic segregation was the fact that in cities such as New York and Boston a significant percentage of "black" Catholics were West Indian immigrants, as new to American shores as the latest arrivals from Galway or Galicia.
Also making these analogies plausible was the relative handful of African-Americans generally, let alone African-American Catholics, living in the northern cities. Following a series of violent clashes in the 1850s and 1860s, especially in New York City, residential contacts between Euro-American Catholics and African-Americans dwindled over the next fifty years, as the densely populated pedestrian city of the antebellum era developed into the modem metropolis. Packed into neighboring tenements in 1850, African-Americans and immigrant Catholics were more likely seventy years later to live in separate neighborhoods made possible by improved transportation and lower-density housing.
And in these extended cities, African-Americans made up only a tiny percentage of the total population. In 1920, for example, African-Americans constituted just 2.7 percent of the population in New York and 4.1 percent in Chicago. In heavily Catholic cities such as Buffalo and Milwaukee, African-Americans did not reach 1 percent of the total. By contrast, first- and second-generation European immigrants made up over half of the population in almost all northern cities.
Lines between "race" and what is now considered "ethnicity" were unclear. The assumption that Celtic, Polish, and German races existed was common; as was the belief that differences between these races and the "Anglo-Saxon" race were deep and enduring. The Knights of Columbus funded a monograph series in the early 1920s aimed at publicizing the "racial contributions of the various groups that make up the American people." Subjects included the Irish, Germans, Italians, and African-Americans. At the 1926 Eucharistic Congress in Chicago, the cardinals present agreed to meet with the "thousands of Chicagoans of Foreign birth or extraction." Among the meetings listed were those of German, Italian, Polish, French, Portuguese, and African-American Catholics. A Detroit newspaper list of the Catholic parishes placed the one African-American parish under the "strictly-foreign speaking" category. Philadelphia's Cardinal Denis Dougherty informed diocesan clergy in 1934 that both African-American and immigrant children must be allowed to attend the parochial school nearest them instead of being shunted off to the nearest "colored" or "national" parish. The impetus for Dougherty's ruling, according to one account, was as much to stop Irish pastors from turning away Italian children as it was to lessen discrimination against African-Americans.
Even the 1919 Chicago riot suggested the complexity of these divisions. Irish-American gangs led the attacks on African-Americans, but most Poles and Lithuanians refused to participate, and indeed disparaged the Irish for doing so. (A handful of African-Americans, in fact, lived peaceably within the Polish section of the area.) In a marker of the European racial vocabulary possessed by many immigrants, one Polish priest urged parishioners not to join the "black pogrom." And some Poles during the riot referred to "whites" as a separate group, distinct from Eastern Europeans.
A 1932 study is especially revealing. Members of a Catholic peace group asked sixty Catholic schools to provide “specific instances of Racial Differences in children." Significantly, the organizers of the study equated "racial" problems with both "Negroes" and "foreign children." Responses typically discussed differences within the European tradition. A Pennsylvania principal wrote that "Our Polish and Lithuanian students expressed great surprise that their Catholic associates seemed to dislike them because of their race," while another respondent discussed the effort of the Altar Boys society "to interest the Italian boys to make them feel at home with a group predominantly Irish." One Wisconsin teacher noted the complexities of the situation. "There seemed to be some racial prejudices in our school due to the slowness of the Polish students in grasping situations. . . . Those of Irish descent felt that they were a bit superior to German students. The two races were solid in their disapproval of some Italians who were really bright." The student head of the Chicago Catholic Student Conference made a similar observation as late as 1935, arguing that resolutions opposing discrimination would be too controversial for his organization. Either objections would be made to the motions or "a wag would offer to amend it by adding after the word 'Negro' the words 'Irish, German, English, Polish,' etc . . .”
African-American Catholic activists rarely criticized this racialist language. When the indefatigable Thomas Wyatt Turner formed the Federated Colored Catholics (FCC) in 1925, the group's constitution stated that the organization's "sole purpose is to weld all others [African-American Catholics] into a solid unit for race betterment." In a 1926 letter to the Catholic bishops noting the lack of progress since 1919, the FCC explained that “Our effort is to have every Catholic Negro organization in the country affiliated with the central body which will act as a clearinghouse for Negro Catholic opinion.”
Indeed, the separation of African-American Catholics was in part voluntary. When the James family moved to Chicago's South Side from St. Louis in 1929, son David recalled fears that without a "Negro" parish African-American children would not obtain positions as altar boys and that teenagers would date members of another race. Representatives for Cleveland's African-American Catholics made much the same point. Without "opportunity and encouragement," they warned, the "holy aspirations which surge within the hearts of our boys to serve as acolytes," as well as the "virgin longing that inflames the souls of our girls for the loving devoted service in the various activities of a Catholic parish" would wither away.
In Boston, a group of African-American and West Indian Catholics petitioned Archbishop William O'Connell in 1920 for a separate parish, even though outside observers had only recently applauded the integration of worshippers at the local cathedral. The group's spokesman, John Wooten, emphasized that "Many of our Catholic young men and women coming from the South are neglecting their faith because there is no special one in charge of Negro interests in Boston. Of course we are aware of the fact that we might attend any Catholic Church but still like all other races we like our own. For an instance, Irish parishes are interested in the Irish question whilst we are deeply interested in the Negro question." A Cleveland African-American Catholic expressed similar views. Among the many diverse nationalities that go to make up the Catholic body of this large cosmopolitan city," he informed his bishop, "there are about two hundred persons of Negro birth. . . . The Church in her wisdom, although looking ever toward the day when all nations shall be as one, nevertheless realizes that under earthly conditions religion and piety are best developed along ethnological lines and She therefore tolerates the division into racial groups." Brooklyn African-American Catholics asked for “the establishment of a church among us, and the defense and propagation of our holy faith within our race.”
Some Euro-American clerics made parallel arguments. An Omaha pastor argued that "I do not say they are inferior—from man to man all are equal before God—but they feel oppressed, and so they prefer to have a church of their own . . . where they feel themselves on an equality with their fellow worshippers. . . . Have they not the same right to this privilege as Poles, Italians and others?" Or as a member of the Board of Indian and Negro missions put it, "most of our people do not care to go to resorts notably frequented by the Jews, or even in a less pronounced way such a place would not be ferquented [sic] by the Poles if it were known that Italians largely predominated there." Another priest suggested treating the African-American migrant as a "sort of foreigner" while a seminarian maintained that "it seems like a fallacy to conclude from Common Brotherhood in Christ to the essential injustice of racial distinctions; class distinctions are natural—are race distinctions necessarily unjust?”
American Catholic scholars echoed this racialist ideology. To be sure, theologians pointed out the wrongs of discrimination, discounting any claim of a biblical curse on African-Americans and asserting that African-Americans were equal in all mental capabilities. Discussion of segregation, however, was more nuanced. All citizens, argued Father Francis J. Gilligan, should meet "as equal in street cars, in high-schools, in libraries, in factories, in offices, and in professional societies.” And yet, Gilligan added, in a canon law thesis directed by the foremost Catholic liberal, Monsignor John Ryan, "social separation is not seriously uncharitable because some members of the colored group are offended by the practice." Indeed, "social" segregation did not imply inferiority. It was important to distinguish "ideal[s] of life from the commandments which were imposed under the penalty of sin." He continued, "If this Christian tradition is applied to the specific phase of racial contacts under consideration it appears evident that many of the actions involved in social separation are not immoral." Understandably, then,
It is proper that in every section where large groups of Negroes dwell that separate parishes should be established for them. Many of the colored just as the French, the Germans, and the Polish prefer to worship by themselves. When racial groups in a nation differ strikingly the Church has always permitted them to form separate congregations.
This broad "racial" vocabulary was not limited to Catholics. A primary task of the era's scientific community had been to establish a set of "racial" taxonomies, many of which emphasized differences among European groups. What made Catholics particularly fond of this terminology was its applicability. Although less committed to the essentialist hierarchies pervasive in the scientific literature, American Catholics were accustomed to viewing the world as a series of loosely connected enclaves, with the various "racial" groups staking out claims to different sections of the city and different parochial institutions. One priest discussing the complexities of the American parish system emphasized the "distinct limits" and boundaries placed upon Polish national parishes, casually adding that “the same is true for German parishes, Italian parishes, negro parishes and so forth.”
At the same time, efforts by various Catholic “racial" groups to establish genuinely independent sources of authority—especially lines of communication to Rome—met resolute opposition. From the episcopal perspective, the marked similarities between the various Catholic groups, despite obvious "racial" differences, would make parochial distinctions less vivid in the long run. Such assimilation would make the balancing task performed by Catholic leaders more manageable. "The clannishness that made the language parish possible," concluded one cleric in 1936, was being transformed into "mild dislike." Chicago's Cardinal Mundelein optimistically referred to this process as the “fading out of racial lines in our own midst.”
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What became controversial was not Catholic racialism in theory but Catholic racialism in practice. Superimposed upon the Catholic racialist model of a series of geographically and culturally distinct parish neighborhoods was an alternative system of racial organization. Deeply embedded within the America that Catholic immigrants wished to claim as their own, this racial system emphasized distinctions between "black" and "white."
All Catholic immigrant groups encountered this ideology. Irish immigrants distanced themselves from disparaging references to the "Celtic Race" and equations of Irish with "nigger" during the years after the famine migration, Poles warded off stereotypes about the "Slavic Races" and southern Italians feared that their skin color might place them on the "colored" side of the American racial divide. The prejudice against African-Americans resulting in part from these anxieties caused one liberal cleric to complain about "the infection of Catholic life in this country.”
For Catholics to bracket African-Americans as simply another "immigrant" group, in other words, ignored the way in which Euro-Americans claimed a shared identity. The same priest proposing that African-Americans be viewed as "foreigners" could also assume the existence of "our Caucasian society" and lump Irish, Italians, and Poles into one "white" race.
The logic of segregated African-American institutions in this context was difficult to elaborate. By the 1930s, students from various Euro-American backgrounds were accepted at most Catholic schools and parishes. Only African-American Catholics were frequently denied admission. As one pastor of an African-American parish in Philadelphia noted in 1936, "finally the various National Catholic Immigrant groups—Polish, German, Irish, Italian etc. are slowly merging and are gradually losing their spirit of European parochialism." Why then, he wondered, were African-American Catholics still encouraged to form separate parishes? African-American Catholic Gustave Aldrich concisely outlined the situation. "They [African-American churches] do not stand upon the same plane with the churches set apart by request for the foreign speaking element. Father Cassilly himself states that the second and third generations are absorbed into the general parish work; their separate churches become English speaking or disappear. Not so with the segregated church for colored people."
Placed in this biracial context, many African-American Catholics viewed separate institutions as a slur. After announcing a policy of "national" parishes for Chicago's African-Americans, Archbishop Mundelein received a petition from 81 African-American Catholics stunned that "they alone shall enter into the sanctuary over whose portals is written in blazing letters of shame, 'SEGREGATED.'" Cleveland bishop Joseph Schrembs explained to the apostolic delegate that after the opening of a parish for African-Americans "the greatest opposition to the establishment of this church came from the Negroes themselves. They claimed that by establishing a Negro church I was favoring the policy of so-called segregation. They wanted equal rights with the white people and, therefore, opposed the establishment of a Negro church.” The most damning criticism came from W. E. B. DuBois. "Because Catholicism has so much that is splendid in its past . . . it is the greater shame that 'nigger' haters clothed in its episcopal robes should do to black Americans in exclusion [and] segregation . . . all that the Ku Klux Klan ever asked."
Also calling into question the Catholic vision of a city as a collection of parish enclaves was the process of neighborhood transition in American cities. The tension between an immovable parish and a mobile, ethnically diverse American populace had been evident since the late nineteenth century, as members of the original Irish and German parishes spread out across the northern cities. One German pastor in Chicago warned his congregation as early as 1903 that "It is important for our community that those who live within the parish stay there. Don't leave your mother church; don't leave the holy St. Boniface parish." Forty years later a mournful lamentation by one Brooklyn parish historian—“Nobody could forsee the changes of fluctuating populations in these American cities. Those pioneers who clung tenaciously to the homeland traditions, built for the duration of the ages as their ancestors had done in Europe”—also referred to the gradual movement of Poles into a previously German Catholic area.
And yet the early experience of "racial" transition, while hardly painless, still seemed manageable since new groups were usually Catholic. At St. Boniface in Chicago, priests fluent in both German and Polish were assigned to welcome new Polish families; at St. Finbar's in Brooklyn, Irish-American clergy and nuns learned Italian. In such situations, as one Catholic sociologist pointed out, "diocesan authorities have had simply to shift personnel in maintaining parish continuity."
Change from a Euro-American Catholic to an African-American neighborhood moved to a different rhythm. Wholesale abandonment by the Catholic population, often after violent resistance to neighborhood change, replaced gradual transition. James Farrell's Studs Lonigan trilogy emphasizes these distinctions. Studs and his Irish-American friends continually grouse about the threat posed by all newcomers to their parish neighborhood, with one friend arguing that "The Polacks and Dagoes, and niggers are the same, only the niggers are the lowest." Studs' father, Patrick Lonigan, notes in a characteristic verbal barrage that "the jiggs have got on Wabash Avenue, and a lot of Polacks and Wops have come in along the southwestern edge of the parish," but he adds that "still I wouldn't be so pessimistic . . . particularly since Father Gilhooley is going to build the new church.”
The most persistent fears of the Lonigans, however, are connected to the possibility of African-American "invasion." Because so few African-Americans are Catholic, only the presence of African-Americans on neighborhood side streets (and in the back pews of St. Patrick's) signals parish collapse. Father Gilhooley, shattered by the exodus of his parishioners, is eventually transferred from the area and replaced by members of a religious order. St. Patrick's maintains its school, but as one former resident puts it, "the pupils are all jiggabooes and the parish is very poor now." Another parishioner laments, "If we had a pastor like Father Shannon, instead of Gilly, that mightn't have happened. He wouldn't be the kind to build a beautiful new church, and then let the parish go to the dogs. He'd have seen to it that the good parishioners stayed, and that the niggers were kept out. He'd have organized things like vigilante committees to prevent it."
Great emphasis is placed within the Farrell novels on whiteness. Friends of the Lonigans lurch in conversation between first identifying themselves as Irish, and then in comparison with African-Americans, as "white." When the neighborhood gang encounters a Jewish orator arguing that all races are equal, he is said to be "trying to prove that a Jew was a white man.”
A 1938 evaluation by one Brooklyn pastor also juxtaposed these two racial languages. When asked to comment on changes within his parish, the pastor replied that "what was once an Irish German congregation is composed at present of six thousand white people and four hundred Catholic Negroes. . . . The presence of Negroes contributes to the rapid exodus of the Catholic Whites." Irish and Germans, in other words, became "Catholic whites" only in the context of African-Americans moving in large numbers to a particular area. Ethnicity was flattened into race.
These developments—neighborhood change, a growing distinction between "black" and "white" and a blurring of lines between Euro-American Catholic groups—were slowly occurring across the urban North. The parish described by Farrell in the Studs Lonigan trilogy, for example, had its real-life analogue. St. Anselm's in Chicago admitted African-Americans only after a long struggle and the failure of a new $350,000 church building to ward off neighborhood change. In 1932, the parish became officially designated as an African-American parish and Society of the Divine Word fathers replaced diocesan priests. Hints of similar turmoil could be found in other parts of the city's South Side. The pastor of one Congregationalist church confided to an interviewer in 1928 his satisfaction with the Irish Catholic domination of his neighborhood. "If the restriction [through legal covenants] of the district can't keep them [African-Americans] out," he argued, "the Irish will." The archdiocesan chancellor wrote to a developer planning to rent to African-Americans across from Holy Angels parish and suggested a plan where the Holy Angels pastor would make "every effort to assist you in renting these apartments to Catholic people."
In Detroit, city officials in the mid-1930s referred to "serious resistance" to neighborhood change on the city's heavily Polish East Side. One analyst attributed tension to "[h]omogenous national and religious habits . . . heavy investments in church properties, parochial schools and community places.” Detroit businessmen appealed to the local archbishop to establish an Italian national parish in one area, hoping that "an Italian Catholic Church, and possibly a Catholic school would keep away the Negroes.” Another pastor, Monsignor Ciarrocchi of Santa Maria parish, informed the archbishop that "I am just in time to stop a property deal which concerns a piece of land and one house, just across our Church door. Negroes would get it." A parish jubilee album published the next year noted that "the many houses we own, are now occupied by our own people; and thus the approach to the Church and to the Parish activities has remained unmolested.”
Discerning patterns in these scattered incidents is easier in retrospect. Into the 1940s, church officials, like scholars and politicians, assumed that the pace of the African-American migration, and thus of neighborhood change, would remain steady or even diminish. The northern cities still seemed riven by conflicts between Catholic immigrant groups—a 1939 scholarly account of Boston's Irish and Italians described their relationship as a "race war.” African-Americans—dwarfed in population by European immigrants and their descendants—continued to live on the periphery of this Catholic world. No more than a handful of Chicago's over 400 parishes were located in heavily African-American neighborhoods, even on the city's South Side. One investigation of Chicago's St. Brendan's parish, only a couple of miles west from the African-American ghetto, calmly asserted that “There is small danger that the Negroes will attempt to move in this portion of West Englewood." Even Studs Lonigan, after his family moves two miles south to a new neighborhood, expresses a quiet satisfaction.
To know that nearly everyone on this street was Catholic gave him a different kind of feeling than what he often had just walking along any street where the people on it were all going about to do any number of things. He felt that he had something in common here and he knew that much about them. They were all on the same side of the fence.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This essay is excerpted from PARISH BOUNDARIES: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North by John T. McGreevy. © 1996 by The University of Chicago. Reprinted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.
