The Federated Colored Catholics: Background Information

Bishop Gregory earned the respect and confidence of the American hierarchy with his longtime campaign to integrate African-American spirituality into the devotional life of the church. In 1984, he served as one of the authors of "What We Have Seen and Heard": A Pastoral Letter on Evangelization from the Black Bishops of the United States. Three years later, at the 1987 National Black Catholic Congress, Bishop Gregory further articulated his vision:

I do not subscribe to those who doubt that cultural accommodation is possible between the Roman Rite and the Black American cultural heritage. I will admit that it will demand a patience on the part of Black American Catholics and the magisterium of the Church. I will admit that it is long overdue and at times can be stymied by misunderstanding, but I do not believe that it is an impossible task for either the Roman Rite nor the Black American cultural community. . . . The process of including the Black Religious heritage in the Liturgy of the Church must be directed by Black Catholics. We are the only ones who can authenticate this development. Since we alone are both Black and Catholic. We realize, of course, that we belong to a universal Church and must live within that Church, but we also realize that the gift of Blackness is uniquely ours to offer to the Church.

The cultural accommodation "between the Roman Rite" and "Black American Catholics" that Bishop Gregory sought was influenced by and mirrored, to some extent, disagreements over African-American advancement strategies over the previous 100 years. African-American leaders sought to overcome the politically, socially, and economically unjust position to which their people had been relegated in American society in several distinctive ways. Booker T. Washington, William Edward Burghardt Dubois, and Marcus Garvey each had their own ideas as to how African-Americans might achieve equality in turn-of-the-century America. Elements of their philosophies of accommodation, integration, and separatism continue to influence views within the African-American community. Understanding the views of such thinkers is central to gaining a sense of the historical context in which the Federated Colored Catholics (FCC) and a central figure of this organization, Thomas Wyatt Turner, operated.

Booker T. Washington

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Booker T. Washington was born a slave in western Virginia in 1856. As a youth he labored in the salt works and coal mines before attending Hampton Institute in Virginia in 1872. In 1881 Washington founded Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama. The Tuskegee Institute focused on developing practical occupational skills. Washington urged African-Americans to ignore the political disenfranchisement and segregation they experienced, believing blacks should concentrate on building an economic base drawing from their community strengths. Many believe that Washington's public world view is most clearly expressed in his "Atlanta Compromise" address, delivered in 1895 at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia. Speaking to a segregated black and white audience, Washington exclaimed "Cast down your buckets where you are," meaning that blacks should not strive for equality with whites. He insisted that those who sought such equality were engaged in the "extremest folly."

He asserted that in social matters blacks and whites can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress Washington's self-help position, often referred to as "accommodationist," meaning it adapted to rather than challenged unequal circumstances between blacks and whites, gained him the support of wealthy white industrialists like Andrew Carnegie, and important political leaders like Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. In his 1884 The Educational Outlook of the South, Washington summarized his vision for race relations in the United States:

I repeat for emphasis that any work looking towards the permanent improvement of the Negro South, must have for one of its aims the fitting of him to live friendly and peaceably with his white neighbors both socially and politically. In spite of all talk of exodus, the Negro's home is permanently in the South; for coming in the bread-and-meat side of the question, the white man needs the Negro, and the Negro needs the white man. His home being permanently in the South, it is our duty to help him prepare himself to live there an independent, educated citizen.

W.E.B. Du Bois

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W.E.B. Du Bois was born in Massachusetts in 1868. He received a B.A. from Fisk University in Tennessee, studied at the University of Berlin, and was the first African-American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard (1895). Du Bois argued tirelessly for complete racial equality and integration. He disagreed with Booker T. Washington's stance toward political and social inequality, believing it too accommodating toward white racism. Du Bois's insistence on complete racial equality gained even greater importance after the Supreme Court upheld legally- sanctioned segregation ("separate-but-equal") in the Plessy vs. Ferguson case in 1896. In 1905 he joined with other civil rights advocates and formed the Niagara Movement to protest racial inequality and the separate-but-equal legal doctrine articulated in the Plessy case.

After internal dissension made the Niagara movement ineffective, Du Bois and white liberals formed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. The NAACP sought to end racial inequality and foster integration, primarily by challenging the legal basis of segregation. In an editorial at the conclusion of the First World War, a conflict in which large numbers of African-Americans served militarily, Du Bois called on his readers to use their special gifts and talents to lay claim to political promises yet unfulfilled:

By the God of Heaven, we are cowards and jackasses, if now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brains and brawn to fight the forces of hell in our own land.

We return.

We return from fighting.

We return fighting!

Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and by the great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.

Marcus Garvey

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Marcus Garvey was born in 1887 on the north coast of British-controlled Jamaica. In 1914 Garvey formed the Universal Negro Improvement and Conservation Association and African Communities League (which was later shortened to the United Negro Improvement Association, UNIA). Garvey immigrated to the United States during World War I, and soon established an American branch of UNIA in New York City. Seeking to unite peoples of African descent throughout the world into one large racial movement, Garvey organized, encouraging pride among Africans everywhere along the way. Garvey's message of black pride and racial separatism was extremely attractive to blacks, gaining him the largest grass roots following of any movement of African Americans in United States history. From the late 1910s to the early 1920s, his movement raised millions of dollars from small donations provided by working-class blacks eager for social and economic change.

UNIA purchased ships to trade with African nations and to allow African-Americans to return to their homeland. "Back to Africa" emerged as a popular slogan of the organization. Unlike Du Bois, who argued for full political and social integration, Garvey thought that African-Americans should establish their own separate social and economic organizations outside of white America. Although Garvey approved somewhat of Washington's focus on economic advancement, the Jamaican immigrant favored complete independence from entanglements with white America. Washington, by contrast, used the popularity of his accommodationist and gradualist approach to inequality to acquire significant patronage and support from white American business leaders and politicians. Before leaving Jamaica, Garvey gave a speech in which he called upon his fellow "Afro-West Indians" to unite in order to make "history for the race":

For God's sake, you men and women who have been keeping yourselves away from the people of your own African race, cease the ignorance; unite your hands and hearts with the people of Africa, Sons and daughters of Africa, I say to you arise, take on the toga of race pride, and throw off the brand of ignominy which has kept you back for so many centuries. Dash asunder the petty prejudices within your own fold.

The African-American Catholic Community

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The African-American community, in short, has been fertile with ideas concerning racial uplift across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This diversity of ideas has been as evident in the Black Catholic community as in the African-American community in general. To begin with, African-American Catholics possessed two distinct and occasionally competing identities: African-American and Catholic. African-American Catholics also shared a number of qualities with other Catholic minority populations. Beginning in the 1840s, large numbers of European Catholic immigrants began arriving in the United States. Coming from different nations and cultures, these groups expressed their faith in a great diversity of ways. For id-nineteenth-century German Catholic immigrants, efforts to preserve their language often drove a wedge between them and English-speaking American Catholics. By the early twentieth century, migration of Catholics from eastern and southern Europe changed the face of the Catholic Church once again, as Polish and Italian Catholics, among others, brought their own languages and traditions into the American Church.

For members of the African-American Catholic community, such questions of identity and loyalty were as vital as those posed by the different groups of European Catholic immigrants. These issues took center stage in the establishment and struggle for control of the Federated Colored Catholics (FCC). Bracketed by the First World War and the Great Depression, the rise and fall of the FCC illuminates many issues that have surfaced again and again in the history of the American Catholic Church.

Whites and Blacks in the Antebellum Catholic Church

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Black Catholics comprised a significant portion of the American Catholic community at the time of the American Revolution. Soon after Pope Pius VI named him superior of the mission church in the newly established United States of America (1785), John Carroll reported to Roman authorities that approximately three thousand Catholic African slaves lived in the state of Maryland alone, with some residing in Pennsylvania as well.

A slave owner himself, Carroll permitted two of his slave women to serve as baptismal sponsors for both black and white infants and willed that his manservant, Charles, be given to one Daniel Brent on the condition that Brent manumit Charles within a year of Carroll's death. Carroll was not alone among the American Catholic religious in owning slaves. In the State of Maryland, the Society of Jesus owned a large number of slaves who worked on the community's farms. Realizing that their properties were more profitable if rented out to tenant farmers rather that worked by slaves, the Jesuits began selling off their slaves in 1837.

Members of a number of women's religious orders often brought their slaves with them upon entering convents. While relations between the sisters and the slaves were generally peaceful, the historical record includes one incident of slaves poisoning two Sisters of Charity of Nazareth in 1848. The motive of the attack is unclear, but one sister died and the other never regained her health as a result. Catholics in the United States not only owned slaves but defended the institution of slavery, even assailing those who worked to abolish it. Orestes Brownson, one of the leading Catholic intellectuals of the pre-Civil War years, exhibited widely held attitudes on slavery and race when he wrote in Brownson's Quarterly Review in 1857:

We say distinctly that we are strongly opposed to all efforts made in the non-slave-holding states to abolish slavery where it legally exists. . . . We do not agree with the abolitionists that slavery is malum in se [evil in itself], and that one cannot with a good conscience be a slave-holder. . . . As a general rule, we believe the slaves are treated with kindness and humanity, sufficiently fed and clothed, and not over-worked.

During the first years of the American Civil War, American Catholic bishops continued to voice opposition to abolitionism, often exhibiting openly racist attitudes. In 1861, Archbishop Hughes of New York wrote in The Metropolitan Record that by making Africans slaves, Europeans and Americans had saved them from the "butcheries prepared for them in their native land." The Irish-born Hughes also thought abolition smelled too much like an English plot.

Although they clash with modern perceptions of civil and human rights, proponents of nineteenth-century Catholic views on race and slavery grounded racist arguments in Biblical passages, pronouncements of various Church councils, the writings of various Church fathers, including Ignatius of Antioch, Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and a number of Papal statements, including Pope Paul III's Sublimis Deus (1537) and Gregrogy XVI's In Supremo (1839). Many American Catholics supported proslavery positions with the claim that Jesus frequently used masters and slaves in his parables without condemning the institution of slavery itself. Saint Paul, in his writings, supported the rights of kindly masters to the obedient service of their slaves. Others argued that slaves were rational humans who, by possessing souls, should be permitted to marry and develop a stable family life. Along with food, clothing, and proper housing, masters had the duty to provide their slaves with religious education and the ability to practice their faith.

There were, however, Catholics that objected to aspects of slavery, and some attacked the institution itself. Pope Gregory XVI, for example, wrote in his Apostolic Letter, In Supremo Apostolatus (1839):

We warn and adjure earnestly in the Lord faithful Christians of every condition that no one in the future dare to vex anyone, despoil him of his possessions, reduce to servitude, or lend aid and favour to those who give themselves up to these practices, or exercise that inhuman traffic by which the Blacks, as if they were not men but rather animals, having been brought into servitude, in no matter what way, are, without any distinction, in contempt of the rights of justice and humanity, bought, sold, and devoted sometimes to the hardest labour. . . . We reprove, then, by virtue of Our Apostolic Authority, all the practices abovementioned as absolutely unworthy of the Christian name. By the same Authority We prohibit and strictly forbid any Ecclesiastic or lay person from presuming to defend as permissible this traffic in Blacks under no matter what pretext or excuse . . .

Another outspoken critic of slavery was Archbishop John Baptist Purcell of Cincinnati, Ohio. In an 1863 Catholic Telegraph editorial Purcell wrote:

"When the slave power predominates, religion is nominal. There is no life in it. It is the hard-working laboring man who builds the church, the school house, the orphan asylum, not the slaveholder, as a general rule. Religion flourishes in a slave state only in proportion to its intimacy with a free state, or as it is adjacent to it."

Though verbally and physically abused within the church, African-American Catholics slowly began to establish religious organizations and orders in the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1829, Mary Elizabeth Lange, who was born in Cuba of Haitian parents, founded the Oblate Sisters of Providence in Baltimore, Maryland. Soon after receiving papal approval, the Oblate Sisters established a number of schools and orphanages for African-American children. Thirteen years later in New Orleans, Louisiana, Juliet Gaudin and Henrietta Delille founded the Sisters of the Holy Family. The next year, 1843, saw members of Baltimore's Haitian Catholic community gathered to establish the Society of the Holy Family, the first African-American lay organization in the United States. Unfortunately, the society was short-lived, disbanding after two years, partially because members of the Archdiocese of Baltimore refused to let the society hold meetings in Calvert Hall, a building owned by them.

Although African-American Catholics began establishing lay organizations and founding women's religious orders, an essential element of religious legitimacy and satisfaction eluded them: clergy from their own community. While there had been African-American Catholics around since before the founding of the United States, historically only white priests tended to their spiritual and corporal needs. Though the Vatican promoted the importance of African-American priests, the American hierarchy, exhibiting commonly accepted racial attitudes, considered African-Americans poor prospects for the priesthood. These attitudes forced the first African-American priests to pursue their formational studies and ordination outside of the United States.

One of six siblings, five of whom took religious vows, the first African-American priest, James Augustine Healy, a light-skinned son of an African-American mother and Irish-immigrant father, was ordained in 1854 in Paris, France. Father Healy went on to become the second bishop of the Diocese of Portland, Maine in 1875. His brother, Patrick Francis Healy, joined the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) in Liege, France in 1864 and became the president of Georgetown University ten years later. A third brother, Alexander Sherwood Healy took on his vocation in 1858 in Rome, Italy, but his career was cut short by an early death. The Healys' two sisters, Josephine and Eliza, respectively joined the Religious Hospitallers of Saint Joseph and the Congregation of Notre Dame. Eliza later became the convent superior.

Struggling to Create a Free African-American Catholic Community

In the three decades following the Civil War, relations between blacks and whites in the Catholic Church were as dramatically transformed as they were in the rest of the country. Emancipated Catholic slaves no longer had to rely on their former masters to support their religious faith. African-American Catholics, both free and former slaves, began to create a uniquely black Catholic organizational life. The condition of the newly freed African-American population did not go unrecognized by the members of the Catholic hierarchy, either in the United States nor in Rome.

In 1866, Archbishop Martin J. Spalding of Baltimore called together the Second Plenary Council of the United States partially in response to the growing need among former slaves for religious care and ministry. One of the key issues discussed by the council was the establishment of separate "national" parishes for African-American Catholics, similar to those established by antebellum Irish and German Catholic immigrants. In addition, Spalding began lobbying for a national ordinary for African-American Catholics. Conceived as a special office to be filled by a bishop that would focus on black Catholic needs, the members of the American hierarchy rejected Spalding's national ordinary, claiming it would impinge on their authority within their respective dioceses.

Along with the American clergy and hierarchy, a number of men's religious orders from Europe began sending missionaries to the United States. In December 1871, for example, four members of the Foreign Missionary Society of England (Mill Hill Fathers), an order whose original mission was to evangelize in Africa, arrived in Baltimore and took responsibility for St. Francis Xavier Parish. The priests soon broadened their mission, working among African Americans in Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, South Carolina, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Under the leadership of the American Father John R. Slattery, the Mill Hill Fathers established Saint Joseph's Seminary. In 1891, Charles Randolph Uncles, trained at Saint Joseph's Seminary, became the first African-American priest ordained in the United States. The next year, Father Slattery received permission from Cardinal James Gibbons and Father Herbert Vaughan, the founder of the Mill Hill Fathers, to establish a separate order, Saint Joseph's Society of the Sacred Heart (Josephites). Over the next several decades, with growing racial segregation, the Josephites became embroiled in a controversy concerning a refusal to accept African-American candidates into their seminary on the grounds that these students lacked adequate training for seminary studies. For many African-American Catholics, the Josephites' decision bordered on blatant racism, further straining relations between the Josephites and certain sectors of the African-American Catholic community.

While making some small, if hard-fought, gains in securing their own clergy, African-American laymen also campaigned for a coordinated national effort to shape church policy as it applied to black Catholics as well as to improve their educational opportunities. Under the leadership of Daniel Rudd, a former slave and publisher of the American Catholic Tribune, the first Black Catholic Congress convened in Washington, D.C. in 1889 to discuss issues ranging from African-American Catholic children, job training, and the promotion of "family virtues." Recognizing the importance of developing good relations with other Catholic ethnic groups, the members of the first congress resolved to express their "sympathies with our brethren of the Emerald Isle, who like ourselves, are struggling for justice at the hands of men," and to discuss with members of the German-American Catholic community the possibility of a general Catholic congress. Members of the African-American laity met again in Cincinnati, Ohio (1890), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1892), Chicago, Illinois (1893), and Baltimore, Maryland (1894).

Conflicting Visions of Race and Power in the FCC

The initial impetus for the establishment of the body which became the Federated Colored Catholics came with the United States' entry into the First World War. Shortly after the mobilization of American troops, the YMCA organized stations on military bases, offering a variety of services for white and black Protestant soldiers. The Knights of Columbus followed suit, opening a number of clubhouses for white Catholics soldiers. The needs of African-American Catholic troops, however, remained unmet. Thomas Wyatt Turner, a biologist that had earned his doctorate in the field at Cornell University (1921), then went on to become the head of the Biological Studies Department at Hampton Institute, quickly organized a committee of African-American parishioners of St. Augustine Church in Washington, D.C. and petitioned Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore to address the problem.

At the end of the war, this Committee Against the Extension of Race Prejudice in the Church, as the group called themselves, changed its name to the Committee for the Advancement of Colored Catholics and petitioned the American bishops to address the growing racial violence spreading across the United States. Receiving a lukewarm reception from the hierarchy, Turner began communicating with the Apostolic Delegation on an number of issues, including the absence of African-American clergy, discriminatory practices of the Josephites and Catholic Universities, and the need for greater African-American representation on the boards of various Catholic welfare organizations.

In 1925, one year after reorganizing themselves as the Federated Colored Catholics, Turner and his supporters convened in Washington, D.C. At the convention, Turner described the FCC as "a voice of the Catholic Negro in America." The first constitution further expressed the goals of the Federation: The object of this Federation shall be to bring about a closer union and better feeling among all Catholic negroes, to advance the cause of Catholic education throughout the Negro population, to seek to raise the general Church status of the Negro and to stimulate colored Catholics to a larger participation in racial and civic affairs.

In Black Catholic Protest and the Federated Colored Catholics 1917 - 1933, historian Marilyn Wenzke Nickels explains Turner's vision of the FCC in the following way:

"The Federation remained for [Turner] a reception house for complaints of discrimination, a vehicle for organizing an annual convention and a voice to speak to the hierarchy on behalf of black Catholics."

The next few years saw Turner defending this vision against challenges posed by Fathers John LaFarge and William M. Markoe. Father LaFarge, described by historian Cyprian Davis as a "patrician" whose mother descended from Benjamin Franklin and Commander Oliver Hazard Perry and who was educated at Harvard University, conceptualized the FCC as a forum in which the brightest black and white Catholic minds could come together and educate the American Church, thereby eliminating the ignorance that underpinned arguments that were prejudiced and discriminatory. Along with educating the American Church, Father LaFarge believed that the FCC needed to develop a program of local, activist chapters through which interracial justice could be practiced. While echoing many of Father LaFarge's sentiments, Father Markoe, a native of Saint Paul, Minnesota and pastor of the African-American Saint Elizabeth Parish in Saint Louis, Missouri, often expressed similar views in much more direct ways. Criticizing the FCC as a "Jim Crow organization," Father Markoe once described his appointment as editor of the FCC's monthly journal, The Chronicle as "infiltrating the organization." Both LaFarge and Markoe believed the primary goal of the FCC should be to advance the mission of the Catholic Church and not merely the status of African-Americans within it.

Differences in outlook among Turner, John LaFarge, and William Markoe served as the catalyst for a number of conflicts that beset the FCC between 1925 and 1932. One gains a greater appreciation for the resulting change in philosophy by comparing the above FCC statement with the following excerpt from the organization's 1932 constitution:

The object of this Federation shall be to bring about a clearer union and a better feeling among all Catholics; to promote relations between the races based on Christian principles; to advance the cause of Catholic education throughout the Negro population; to seek to raise the general status of the Negro in the Church; and to stimulate Catholic Negroes to a larger participation in racial and civic affairs of the various communities and of the whole country.

After the 1932 convention, the FCC changed its name to the National Catholic Federation for the Promotion of Better Race Relations and renamed its journal the Interracial Review. As a result of his protesting against the change, the federation's executive committee removed Thomas Wyatt Turner from office, a decision that led to the splintering of the organization. The documents on this website are intended to illuminate the FCC evolution, the role of the particular actors in that transformation, and finally to raise questions about African Americans, race, and the history of the Catholic Church in the United States.

Postscript (Top of Page)

While the FCC broke into regional factions, the leaders of the organization continued to promote their particular agendas afterward. Soon after the split, Father Markoe was reassigned and left the National Catholic Federation for the Promotion of Better Race Relations, but continued throughout his lifetime to work on issues related to interracial justice. Father LaFarge continued to write on race issues as well, playing a vital role in the establishment and direction of the Catholic Interracial Council of New York. Thomas W. Turner became president of a newly established Federated Colored Catholics and advanced the idea of racial solidarity within the Catholic Church into the early 1950s. Throughout the next half century, those within the Catholic Church of the United States, continued to grapple with the question of how best to serve the needs of particular populations while advancing the spiritual and secular mission of the Church. Today, Catholic organizations such as the National Office for Black Catholics, The Black Catholic Caucus, and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' Secretariat for African-American Catholics continue to work towards this end.

As the modern American Civil Rights Movement gained prominence in the 1950s and 1960s, the Catholic Church responded with a number of pronouncements, including Discrimination and Christian Conscience (1958), On Racial Harmony (1963), and Statement on the National Race Crisis (1968). By the late-1970s and 1980s, attention turned to the issue of how best to recognize and integrate African Americans' particular style of spirituality into the sacramental life of the Catholic Church. In 1987, two works were published that furthered this goal: Lead Me, Guide Me, the first African-American Catholic hymnal, and In Spirit and Truth: Black Catholic Reflections on the Order of the Mass. That same year, while on a pastoral visit to the United States, Pope John Paul II captured the motivating idea behind these works and anticipated the words of the future president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Bishop Wilton D. Gregory:

It is important to realize that there is no black Church, no white Church, no American Church; but there is and must be, in the one Church of Jesus Christ, a home for blacks, whites, Americans, every culture and race. . . . Dear brothers and sisters, your black cultural heritage enriches the Church and makes her witness of universality more complete.

Sources consulted for this introduction: (Top of Page)

Brotz, Howard. African American Social and Political Thought, 1850-1920. Somerset, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991.

Davis, Cyprian. The History of Black Catholics in the United States. New York: Crossroad, 1992.

Du Bois, W.E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Dover Publications, 1994.

Du Bois, W.E.B. "Returning Soldiers," The Crisis, XVIII (May, 1919), p. 13.

Garvey, Marcus. The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, Robert A. Hill, ed. Berkeley: University of California Press 1983.

Glazier, Michael and Thomas J. Shelley, eds. The Encyclopedia of American Catholic History. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1997, especially entries, "African American Catholics," by Cyprian Davis, O.S.B. and "Thomas Wyatt Turner," by Joseph Quinn.