Black, White, and Catholic: New Orleans Interracialism, 1947-1956 (review)

In Black, White, and Catholic: New Orleans Interracialism, 1947-1956, Father Anderson achieves several great historical feats. First, he accomplishes what no other civil rights history to date has attempted to do and that is to address the important ways in which Catholics worked both for and against civil rights for African Americans prior to the famous Catholic involvement in the Selma campaigns of 1965. Second, he identifies interracial Catholic co-operation and advocacy for civil rights for African Americans as the origin of Catholic dissent in the twentieth century. In the case of New Orleans interracialism black and white Catholics who were working together for racial justice often did so without the support and often in defiance of their clerical leaders. And, thirdly, Anderson's study is unique and praiseworthy because it shows the agency of black Catholics who on the one hand possessed a fierce love and commitment to the Catholic Church but on the other hand were not afraid to challenge the practices of racism that they experienced on a daily basis in their own church. In this history, the voices and actions of black Catholics figure as prominently in Anderson's thesis and historical account of the time as do those of white Catholics. In this history, black Catholics are not objects in the history but very clearly the subjects of the history.

Father Anderson brings this time, 1947-1956, this culture, New Orleans Catholicism, and these people, black and white Catholics, to life for the reader by carefully and engagingly developing the personalities of the major black and white Catholic figures involved on the side of racial justice as well as those of Catholics adamantly opposed to interracialism. The reader can hear the hope and conviction in the interracial efforts of the black and white Catholic college students at Xavier University, Loyola University, Ursuline College, the College of the Sacred Heart, and Dominican College led by Father Joseph H. Fichtner, S.J., can feel the strident opposition to interracialism led by figures such as Father Sam Hill Ray, S.J., and can sense the tentative quality of Archbishop Rummel's response to this movement in his archdiocese.

Father Anderson is able to convey all of this through his excellent use of the archival sources made available to him, through his astute understanding of the historical period and the unique culture of New Orleans Catholicism, and through his interviews with subjects of this history. All of these factors work together to allow Anderson to reveal the radical nature of things that we take for granted today like attending Mass in an integrated setting, sitting down for breakfast with men and women of different races, or attending lectures where the presenters are not all white. Yet in New Orleans in the late 1940's and in the rest of the South, throughout much of the Midwest, and in parts of the North, none of these things was the norm and engaging in them was countercultural. But these were the tactics and strategies black and white Catholics in New Orleans employed to defy Jim Crow, to live what they understood to be truly Christian lives, and ultimately to begin to transform their church and their culture.

Black, White, and Catholic: New Orleans Interracialism, 1947-1956, is a welcome addition to civil rights history, United States Catholic history, and African American studies. It is also a wonderful choice for undergraduate and graduate courses in these areas. Its highly readable quality makes it appropriate for non-specialists and its novel thesis and unique view on the role of the Catholic Church in the civil rights movement makes it especially engaging for specialists as well. I believe it should be and will be viewed as a landmark study in United States Catholic history.