Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration by Matthew J. Cressler (review)

The Great Migrations make for a captivating story, not only because they constitute one of the largest migrations ever of the African American population, but also because their movement is inextricably intertwined with the history of U.S. Catholicism. Commonly, Catholicism is generally viewed in the United States as a faith tradition dominated by white people. The prevailing assumption is that Catholicism is European in its origins and its essence, and that black people are predominately Protestants. In actuality, the majority of Catholics in the Americas are not white, and the majority of black Christians in the Americas are Catholic.

Matthew J. Cressler, an assistant professor of religious studies at the College of Charleston, canvasses a period that is bookended by the different ways black Catholics endeavored to articulate and live their faith reflective of their cultural idiom. Between 1915 and 1970, two waves of migration saw an estimated total of six million black Americans leave the South for metropolises in the Midwest and Northeast. Cressler delivers a lucid narrative that uncovers the vivid story of the rise of black Catholicism in Chicago, becoming the setting for one of the largest and most prominent black Catholic communities in the country. Black Catholic Chicago as defined, described, and analyzed by Cressler, provides a rich context to study the history of black Catholics and the narrative of African American history amid the dramatic changes across twentieth-century America.

The book is organized into two parts. In the first three chapters, the story details the precipitous rise of black Catholic Chicago, from roughly the 1930s through the 1950s. "The rise of Black Catholic Chicago" is described as "a significant, albeit small, constituency in Catholic Chicago and the establishment of the institutional infrastructure necessary to sustain them" (20). In tracing the religious-demographic shifts, Cressler details the atmosphere of change on the South and West sides of Chicago as a result of the outflow of white Catholics and the influx of African American migrants. Cressler begins his discussion focusing on the mass conversions of black Americans to Catholicism the Great Migrations initiated "by inculcating new religious practices that set converts apart from other Black Christians in the city" (16). At the center of this shift from black Protestant churches was the coupling of white Catholic missionaries (sisters, brothers, priests, and lay people) and southern black migrants. "Missionaries," explains Cressler, "hoped to make the United States Catholic by winning converts to what Catholics considered the 'One True Faith'" (21).

To punctuate the story about the changing landscape of African American religious culture and the proliferation of options for black migrants, Cressler presents a driving question: "Why did African Americans enter the Catholic Church in record numbers in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s?" (48). Cressler sets forth a picture of these black converts that suggests "no one explanation alone can account for why African Americans converted, not even that of black Catholics themselves" (61). What Cressler demonstrates, nonetheless, is that the Catholic school and the evangelizing classroom provided "religious training [that] informed 'the entire curriculum and permeated the whole child every minute of the day'" (63). Drawing on the significance of the religious culture Catholic education created, Cressler pinpoints that religious formation created the conditions to absorb and embrace a tradition under which becoming Catholic simply "felt right" (77). One key aspect of "feeling right" was Catholicism's purported universalism exemplified by the allure of devotional practices like the Living Stations of the Cross. Cressler further enriches this narrative, when he observes: "Black migrants became Catholic at the nexus of motivations and pressures, hopes and fears, and unexpected daily occurrences. They were educated and formed, body and soul, by forces of which they were often unaware" (80).

The chapters in the second part of the book break open the collision between black Catholicism and the rise of...