From the Back of the Pews to the Head of the Class: The Remarkable Accomplishments of a Segregated Catholic High School in the Deep South by Robert McClory (review)

Robert McClory has masterfully organized oral history interviews from an unlikely source—a small Catholic school in Mobile, Alabama—to show readers the importance of providing safe communities for young black people everywhere. Excerpts from almost forty interviews are organized chronologically by subject to trace a trajectory of change in a city often neglected in civil rights history. After fifty-seven years as a high school, Most Pure Heart of Mary High School (HOM) graduated its last class in 1968, but graduates from the fifties and sixties still profoundly shape civic and religious life in their hometown and throughout the United States.

After a forward by Alexis H. Herman, a HOM grad who was the first black person to serve as the US Secretary of Labor, McClory introduces the life story of Dora Finley, a driving force behind Mobile's African American Heritage Trail and one of the alumni who instigated the oral history project. McClory then selects memories from the schools' early years, with ninety-one-year-old Jacqueline Rice remembering that the dollar-a-month tuition was hard for her parents, and a light-skinned Creole named Genevieve Sogata recollecting that she had to receive permission from the bishop to enter the Carmelite sisterhood because a "mixed-race residence" was forbidden by law in Alabama, as were most opportunities for interaction between blacks and whites in this most segregated of times.

In the chapter "Life with Jim Crow," 1965 graduate Marion Lewis remembers that you were safe "as long as you obeyed the rules" and never left your black enclave of home and school, even if that home was a shack next to the city dump, where scavengers lived off the refuse of whites (32). And in "Family and Community," McClory demonstrates how closely both of those institutions worked together to preserve the safety of, and provide a bright future for, the HOM students. In several other chapters, such as "Inside Views" and "The Staff: Raising Expectations," one learns the secret to the success of the Heart of Mary students interviewed: the thirteen Sinsinawa Dominican Sisters who came to the school as teachers and administrators in 1960.

These sisters wanted to make a difference in the lives of their students, and they did, holding them to extremely high standards of academic excellence, including two years of Latin and two of French, and nurturing a freedom of conscience that enabled the young students both to engage in the civil rights movement when it moved to Mobile and to enter a desegregated white world with fortitude and pride.

This community also transformed English teacher Sr. Patty Caraher. She re-tells with awe her realization that she had become part of the Mobile black Catholic community when she heard two children on the playground arguing about whether she was black or white.

All of the sisters teaching at the school became increasingly uneasy with the segregationist actions of their Roman Catholic Church and communicated this to the students by speaking forcefully against the "back of the pews" rules both inside and outside diocesan buildings. The long-standing exclusionary policies of official Roman Catholicism are examined in several chapters with memories of Archbishop Toolen, followed by three chapters on student and faculty participation in the civil rights movement.

Mobile's black pastors had not wanted Martin Luther King to come to their city, preferring their own brand of quiet negotiation. In 1964, Archbishop Toolen announced the integration of all Catholic high schools in his diocese, a positive move that nonetheless sounded the death knell for Heart of Mary High, as desegregation laws did for many all-black schools. HOM closed four years later and the students transferred sadly to other schools, where they endured years...