A Lutta Continua: Black Catholic Activism in Detroit, Michigan in the 1970s

A Lutta Continua: Black Catholic Activism in Detroit, Michigan in the 1970s Nancy M. Davis I n the annals of Catholic history in America, the story of black Catholics in Detroit, Michigan might appear to be insignificant particularly when compared to the extensive histories of Catholic populations in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, throughout Maryland and Louisiana. Even as the study of AfricanAmerican Catholics has unfolded since 1990 when Father Cyprian Davis, O.S.B., published his extensive national history, Detroit is usually located miles off the radar screen as these studies typically center on Baltimore, Maryland, New Orleans, and even New York City with its sizeable population of black Catholics from the Caribbean. And yet, if one is to examine Catholic history and American race relations , the struggle of black Catholics in Detroit takes on enormous importance. Though Detroit maintained for much of its history a Protestant leadership, as historian Thomas Sugrue points out, Detroit was dominated through the 1970s by a “‘blue-collar workforce’ that was predominantly Catholic.”1 In fact, as noted by Catholic historians Leslie Tentler and John McGreevy, most northern American cities through the 1950s were heavily populated by Catholics and, according to Detroit’s Archbishop John F. Dearden, “the Negro-White confrontation in American cities. . .” was “. . . in great part a Negro-Catholic confrontation. . . .”2 And therefore , the experience of black Catholics in Detroit, a city which ranked fifth in size in 1960, is important to the larger story of twentieth century race relations and the Catholic church. 15 1. Thomas J. Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 552. 2. John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Urban North (Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 1996, 212; Leslie Tentler, Seasons of Grace: A History of the Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990); John F. Dearden, “Challenge to Change in the Urban Church” (speech, National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice, Kansas City, Missouri, 1967). Of equal historic significance, Detroit has been the hub for much of the second half of the twentieth century of a militant form of Black nationalism that helped to guide and shape the city’s political and social culture. Its NAACP branch at mid-century managed to bridge Detroit’s black middle and working-class leadership and, during this period, was either the largest or the largest fundraising branch. In later decades, Detroit spawned numerous other moderate to radical black organizations that included the Trade Union Leadership Council and the League of Black Revolutionary workers, the latter serving as the umbrella organization for many small, heavily politicized African-American union groups. This proclivity to protest, which was also found among segments of the city’s black Catholics, further renders the black Catholic experience in Detroit of perhaps greater importance than its numbers , and thus this article argues that Detroit should be among the primary places in urban America where racial confrontation in the twentieth-century Roman Catholic Church is examined. To examine such relations, this article will chronicle black Catholic activism in the late 1960s through the 1980s with the aim of contextualizing militancy and protest in the larger story of church relations and post-World War II black Detroit. It will paint a picture of what militancy among black Catholics looked like during this period and chronicle two protest organizations (Black Catholics in Action [1968-1971] and the Detroit and Michigan Black Lay Catholic Caucuses [1970-1974, 1971-79]), as well as the Office of the Black Secretariat, which was an outgrowth of this protest and carried the mantle for black Catholic concerns through the 1970s. This article takes the position that all of these organizations and events are historically significant and particularly when studied together Detroit must become central to the study of race and the Catholic Church in the urban north and, in particular, the role played by the laity in such protest. And though two of the organizations chronicled were short-lived, this article aims to demonstrate that their influence in many cases extended well beyond their years and offers as evidence of the former, the impact that...