St. Peter Claver Church and School, Philadelphia, PA: A Collaborative Effort

St. Peter Claver Church was the “Mother Church” for African American Catholics in Philadelphia.¹ This essay will describe some of people who called first for a school for “colored” children and then for a church and parish. Among the people who supported this cause were the Drexel family of Philadelphia and the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, founded by Mother M. Katharine Drexel.²

Black Catholics have been present in Philadelphia since before the American Revolution. For most of this time, they worshiped in Catholic churches as the whites did, but not with them. Many attended services at St. Joseph’s, Holy Trinity, or St. Augustine’s, but faced prejudice that took the form of their being required to sit in the choir loft or stand during services.³ For a while, Holy Trinity set aside the 9:00 a.m. Mass each Sunday for the African American community, but the transfer of one of the priests reduced the number of clergy available for Mass and resulted in the end of this practice. Of great importance to the black community was education for their children. Anthony Benezet and the Friends of Philadelphia first recognized that “the welfare of the States demands the education of Negro children.”⁴ W. E. B. DuBois also noted that the “public schools seemed to have been largely manned by colored teachers and were for a long time less efficient than the charity schools.” He also observed that the “Catholic Church has in the last decade made great progress in this work. There is one Catholic church in the city designed especially for Negro work—St. Peter Claver’s at Twelfth and Lombard.”⁵

Prior to St. Peter Claver’s opening, Father Thomas Lilly of St. Joseph’s had made the African Americans his special charge. He founded a school for them on Lombard Street near Fourth, a location near the greatest density of the city’s African American population.⁶ James Wood, the archbishop of Philadelphia, then invited the Oblate Sisters of Providence—a community of African American women religious headquartered in Baltimore—to start a school in Philadelphia for African Americans at 430 Lombard Street.⁷ They opened Blessed Peter Claver School in August of 1863. By 1871, the Oblates “were being publicly insulted in the city of Brotherly Love. They were often forced from the sidewalk into the street.” The Oblate Diary for November 1871 notes:

The school in Philadelphia, not being able to support the Sisters, Mother left today. She wished to see the Bishop so as to know what he would decide upon.

The Diary continued, on December 15, 1871:

So the Bishop (Wood) thought it best to close the school in Philadelphia. Sister Agatha and the few boarders returned home today.⁸

The Oblate Sisters had not received financial support from the diocese of Philadelphia but relied on donations, fees and financial support from the Baltimore motherhouse.

With these challenges, it was difficult finding a permanent home for the school. After the departure of the Oblate Sisters, the School Sisters of Notre Dame began to offer catechetical instruction for African Americans near Rittenhouse Square. They then asked Archbishop Wood for permission in 1878 to open a school for African American girls on West Rittenhouse Square, in a rented house, which the owner sold the following year to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The Sisters then moved the school to 7th and Pine Streets, but it was closed in 1882 due to financial problems and the opening of public schools to African Americans. Previously, only a few schools throughout the city had been open to African Americans. Many schools for African American children were sectarian, such as Anthony Benezet’s school which was supported by the Society of Friends. According to Benjamin C. Bacon’s “Statistics of the Colored People of Philadelphia” of 1859, there were 1,031 Colored children in public schools, 748 in charity schools, 211 in benevolent and reformatory schools, and 331 in private schools, with an aggregate of 2,321 pupils. Additionally...