A Cry for Justice: Daniel Rudd and His Life in Black Catholicism, Journalism, and Activism, 1854–1933 by Gary B. Agee (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 94 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY A Cry for Justice: Daniel Rudd and His Life in Black Catholicism, Journalism, and Activism, 1854-1933 Gary B. Agee Given the winner-centric nature of historical narratives, little wonder that a loser like Daniel Rudd remained unknown for so long. An African American Catholic at the turn of the twentieth century, this journalist and activist issued a “cry for justice” from his position within a double minority. He sought to convince Catholics of blacks’ equality and blacks of Catholicism’s color-blindness. Rudd lived at the intersection of these cultures, doomed to failure and consequent obscurity as the winners gained fame. Gary Agee’s A Cry for Justice recovers the tragic story of this African American’s advocacy for full racial equality. Despite the dates in the subtitle, this work is neither a true biography nor a true intellectual history. However, the book will interest anyone who seeks to understand how one African American journalist and activist sought racial equality through Catholicism. Agee’s narrative works best when the three themes mentioned in his subtitle— Catholicism, journalism, and activism—interacted in Rudd’s life, thought, and writings. Rudd’s ultimate goal of full racial equality included both radical legal and social equality. The author helpfully divides into three stages this black Catholic journalist’s “cry for justice .” First, Rudd editorialized confrontationally , naming specific inequalities and advancing racial justice. Rudd’s provocations eventually gave way to promoting the Catholic Church, an institution he long held as a model of racial equality. Through various networks and organizations , Rudd pushed for racial causes, such as black clergy and educational opportunities for blacks. In the final stage of Rudd’s “cry for justice,” he embraced an ideology of racial uplift, not unlike Booker T. Washington’s platform, based on economic and character development in the face of legal and social discrimination. Born a slave to a Catholic family in Bardstown, Kentucky, Rudd grew up in the racially mixed religious atmosphere of central Kentucky’s “Catholic Holy Land.” Rudd later reminisced about taking his first communion kneeling “beside as fair a damsel as ever bowed before that rail” in 1863 (14). Eventually, Rudd set up a newspaper and printing office in Cincinnati, from where he and his subscription agents traveled extensively to promote his paper. The American Catholic Tribune ran for over a decade (1886-1897) and was a premier African American Catholic newspaper with a readership that at one time reached ten thousand . Rudd edited the periodical, but he also lectured around the country and participated in church and black-advocacy groups. An active lay Catholic his entire life, Rudd helped organize the Colored Catholic Congress in the late 1880s and participated in the Catholic Press Association. After a disastrous move to Detroit in the 1890s and competition from a rival Philadelphia periodical, Rudd quit journalism and migrated to the Deep South. Living in Mississippi and Arkansas, he worked for a black entrepreneur, about whom he wrote a biography before retiring. At its worst, Agee’s text reads like a list of quotes from Rudd, his allies, and his opponents . The book also suffers from significant organizational problems. For instance, readers finish an early chapter having learned about the BOOK REVIEWS SUMMER 2012 95 beginnings of the American Catholic Tribune, only to find a later section entitled “The Birth of the American Catholic Tribune.” During a chapter devoted to Archbishop John Ireland’s view of racial justice, Rudd appears only every so often to offer a response to the hierarch’s pronouncements . Other episodes (such as a white priest’s racist speech to the Colored Catholic Congress) appear in several chapters with nearly identically vague descriptions—and readers never discover the actual content of the speech. In general, the author repeats himself so often and in so many places that it proves a distraction. Agee appropriately writes of Rudd’s contexts (Catholic social thought, racial violence, economic depression) and he concludes that the activist altered his plans for social equality in response to changing external circumstances. But Rudd hints that the narrative was more complex, and this hidden story scintillates. In it, ironies abound: Rudd attended primarily...