Another Long Civil Rights Movement: How Catholic Interracialists Used the Resources of their Faith to Tear Down Racial Hierarchies

As African Americans moved to northern urban centers like Chicago starting in the 1910s, white Catholics often met them with hostility. But a contingent of black laypeople demanded that their church and fellow Catholics embrace the universality of their faith. By the 1930s, these middle-class black Catholics recruited white lay Catholics to their cause and forged interracial partnerships that lasted through the 1960s. Together, these Catholic interracialists worked for what they called interracial justice, seeking equality within the Catholic Church’s institutions and in American education, housing, and employment. This article argues that their activism constituted another strand of the long civil rights movement, which began in the 1930s. While historians of the long movement have demonstrated the centrality of the labor/left coalition, they have not adequately accounted for religious actors supporting the black freedom struggle. Using sources from black and white lay people, as well as the more traditional institutional sources, the article also shifts the narrative of Catholic interracialism away from white priests and toward the laity, and argues that on issues of race, the continuities in American Catholicism before and after the Second Vatican Council are more significant than the differences.