Writing Black Catholic Lives: Black Catholic Biographies and Autobiographies

Considering the minority status of Black Catholics in the United States, there is an illuminating body of biographical works whose subjects are Black and Catholic. Black Catholics writing their own life stories and others writing the lives of Black Catholics have shed light on how race and religion have shaped them as individuals as well as the wider communities they represent. These texts also give a more intimate look at what it has meant to be Black and Catholic over time. The women and men who are the subjects of Black Catholic biographies come from different regions of the country and different generations. Some lived quite holy lives and are currently being considered for canonization. Other lives demonstrate the great difficulty many Catholics have with the official moral, social, and political positions of the institutional church in various periods of history. And, what may surprise many Americans, both Black and Catholic, is that also among these Black Catholic lives are many of their cultural icons and political figures. This article takes a look at Black Catholic autobiographies and biographies from 1942, with publication of Dark Symphony by Elizabeth Laura Adams, to 2011 and the publication of A More Noble Cause: A.P. Tureaud and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Louisiana, A Personal Biography by Rachel L. Emanuel and Alexander P. Tureaud, Jr.

Most autobiographies and biographies considered here possess an explicitly Catholic viewpoint or worldview. These books were written because their subjects are Catholic and more to the point, because they are Black and Catholic. How they live their lives as Black Catholics and how they relate to the institutional church is what matters about the subjects of these biographies. Most biographies that fall into this category were published by Catholic presses with Catholic readers in mind. With the exception of a few persons of historical note in U.S. Catholic history, the majority of explicitly Black Catholic biographies are not about well known persons. This distinguishing feature of Black Catholic biography is worthy of note and it prompts one to ask "What is it about the lives of these ordinary people that their life stories should be written?" Perhaps it is because their stories are original and need to be told.

Another group of biographies that should not be overlooked are those of well-known African Americans who also happen to be Catholic. They are politicians, lawyers, composers, singers, and actors. Their contributions to society and culture are what their biographies highlight. Yet a careful reading of such biographies reveals a strong Catholic influence in these Black lives. Biographies of Mary Lou Williams, Philippa Duke Schuyler, and Billie Holiday are examples of such texts. Soul on Soul: The Music and Life of Mary Lou Williams by jazz historian, Tammy L. Kernodle, is the seminal biography of jazz pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams. In Soul on Soul, Kernodle looks intensively at Williams' conversion to Catholicism in the 1950s and shows how Williams' Catholic faith changed the trajectory of her musical career and brought her back to playing and writing jazz. Williams was on the cutting edge of inculturating Catholic worship with jazz idioms in the later 1950s and through the 1970s. ¹ Kathryn Talalay treats the Catholicism of piano prodigy, Philippa Duke Schuyler, in Composition in Black and White: The Life of Philippa Schuyler. According to Talalay, Schuyler was attracted to Catholicism from the time she attended the convent school of Manhattanville College as young girl. Schuyler converted to Catholicism in 1958 at Harlem's St. Charles Borromeo Church. A self-identified "Catholic intellectual," Schuyler wrote Jungle Saints, a book about the Catholic missionaries in Africa whose works she observed and admired on her travels around the continent. ² In her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, Billie Holiday discusses her life as a Catholic and the haven she found with the Sisters of the Good Shepherd in Baltimore when she was a teenager. ³ These works open a new line of questioning that might begin with asking "How did Catholicism influence or inform the politics, policies, ideas and art that influential and famous...