Glenmary Challenge

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2006 issue of Glenmary Challenge
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Black and Catholic
New book reveals what it was like to be a double minority—black and Catholic—in the Jim Crow South and highlights the role of the Catholic Church in the civil rights movement.
By Jean Bach

For most of Mississippi’s history, there have been more Catholics than Baptists living in the city of Natchez, making it the center of Catholicism in a decidedly Protestant state.

It seems appropriate, then, for a Catholic church located in that city to have been the center of the African-American freedom movement. In its 100-plus-year history, Holy Family Catholic Church, the oldest African-American Catholic parish in Mississippi and one of the oldest in the country, has served as a “beacon to the community,” according to parishioner Ora Frazier.

Frazier, and over 40 other members of this Catholic community, tell the story of their parish and its role in the 1960s civil rights movement in the recently released Black and Catholic in the Jim Crow South (Paulist Press). The book, written by Mississippi native Danny Duncan Collum, is based on oral interviews conducted in 1994 by Glenmary Father Tim Murphy.

This book grows out of a project initiated in the 1980s by the Glenmary Research Center and the Josephite Fathers and Brothers, whose priests have staffed the parish throughout its history. The book aims, through the stories and words of Holy Family parishioners, “to leave the reader with some sense of what it was like to be a double minority—black and Catholic—in the 20th-century South,” says Duncan Collum. “And to provide a clearer picture of the testimony the Catholic Church offered during the age of Jim Crow.”

“It makes perfect sense for Glenmary and the Glenmary Research Center to be part of this project,” he continues. “Since the Research Center does research on Catholics in the South, it’s imperative that they understand—and help others understand—this history of black Catholics, including what went right and what went wrong” as African-American Catholics struggled for equality.

“It’s essential that this story be told and preserved as Glenmary continues the Church’s mission in the South,” he says.

“There was much that went right and went wrong as the Church in Mississippi attempted, as Duncan Collum says, to be a nonracial institution in a Jim Crow society, a society where race was primary.

The Jim Crow laws, in effect from 1890-1970, created a racial caste system throughout the South, including Mississippi. Under these laws, blacks and whites could not attend the same schools, sit in the same waiting rooms, use the same washrooms, eat in the same restaurants, or sit in the same theaters. Blacks were denied access to parks, beaches, picnic areas and to many hospitals.

They were barred from many churches too. Except, that is, for Mississippi Catholic churches. Bishop Richard Gerow of the Diocese of Jackson, Miss., made sure of that.

In 1958 he paid a surprise visit to St. Anne Church near Natchez after hearing that there had been threats against black Catholics attending the church. He announced to the congregation that any attempt to keep a black Catholic out of Catholic churches in his diocese was a mortal sin—one that could only be absolved by the bishop himself.

But here’s the dichotomy of the Mississippi Church: All blacks were welcome; but, at St. Mary Cathedral in Natchez, for example, even though the seats weren’t marked, “you just knew….No matter where you went, if there were white people there, you automatically sat in the back,” says Holy Family parishioner Mazie Belle Rolax.

But sitting in the back was not something the young people—Catholic and non-Catholic—were being taught by the Sisters of the Holy Spirit who staffed Holy Family Catholic School then and who continue there today. Children were taught self-esteem, self-respect and, as former student Julia Davis remembers, that it didn’t matter what color your skin was. “You can do anything you want to do,” the sisters said, “just set your mind to it.”

As a result, an entire generation of young, educated African Americans was formed, a generation that was taught to “look white people in the eye as equals, and saw no reason to accept second-class status,” according to Duncan Collum.

In the interviews he conducted, Father Tim says he saw that many who took leading roles in the struggle to transform Natchez society, and in some cases all of Mississippi, were members of this generation and products of Catholic schools like Holy Family.

“The priests and nuns—northern missionaries for the most part—were the only white people working in the black community back then,” says Duncan Collum, except for the police officers and the merchants. Those priests and nuns formed positive relationships with parishioners and students, giving witness to the possibilities that lay ahead through the civil rights movement.

But as the decade of the 1960s showed, the road wouldn’t be easy. The Jim Crow system was challenged and people of both races were rising up and setting their minds to creating an equal society. Mississippi—and Holy Family—became ground zero for the often violent clash between the white establishment and those protesting it.

In the 1960s, Holy Family became the headquarters for the local chapter of the NAACP. Its pastors, especially Josephite Father William Morrissey, took active roles in the movement. Father Morrissey became the first white officer of the NAACP in Mississippi history.

The church offered housing—and protection—to college students from the north who came to Mississippi for the voter registration effort. Parish members like Mamie Mazique and white civil rights activist Marge Baroni worked, often in a clandestine manner, to overturn the Jim Crow laws that governed the state.

Members of the parish continue to struggle with being part of a primarily white Church and being Catholic in a predominately Protestant African-American community.

Today, the church has 350 registered members and the school, suffering from economic hardship, offers an academic program for 126 children in grades preK-4. But no matter the size, the parish continues to be a beacon to the community. It’s like dropping a rock in water, Ora Frazier says. “The ripples have just sort of reached out and made an impact on the Natchez community.”

“I hope this project, this book, has the effect of preserving Holy Family’s story and having it known from generation to generation,” says Duncan Collum.

“The fact that there are these black Catholic communities in the South isn’t something widely known. And even less known is what their struggle has been and what it is today as they continue to struggle with being completely Catholic and completely African-American. Theirs is a prophetic voice to the white power structure and to other black churches.”

Glenmary missioners are among the “northern missionaries” working in Mississippi today, currently staffing eight missions in Northeast Mississippi.

And in many of these mission counties, it’s the Catholic church that is still the only integrated congregation. But today’s issue often isn’t race relations between whites and blacks but between whites, blacks and Spanish-speakers.