The Catholic Church in the Diocese of Galveston-Houston and Desegregation, 1945–1984

Opened in 1929, Our Mother of Mercy in Frenchtown was Houston’s first Creole of color church. Source: Wikimedia Commons, <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:OurMotherofMercyChurchHouston.JPG> [Accessed March 26, 2020].

Born in Houston in 1943, Madeline E. Johnson, a member of St. Nicholas, an African American Catholic church founded in Houston’s Third Ward in 1887, recalled that in her youth she and a cousin once attended Mass at Our Mother of Mercy, a Creole of color church in the Fifth Ward. To her shock and surprise, an usher pushed her and her cousin aside at the altar rail until the last Creole had received communion. Many Creoles of color, who had a mix of French and African (and sometimes Spanish and Native American) ancestry and often spoke French or a French- and African- influenced Creole language, did not consider themselves black as segregation laws categorized them, but to be a distinct group, based on their racial and cultural characteristics. Creoles of color, Johnson remembered, “thought they were better than us. We had segregation within segregation.”¹

In an ironic twist, Creoles of color, whose migration from southwestern Louisiana in the 1920s had created the Frenchtown neighborhood in the Fifth Ward, had helped raise funds to build Our Mother Mercy of Church in 1929 to avoid segregation. They wanted their own church because ethnic Mexicans had segregated them in the rear pews of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, a parish in the Second Ward for people of Mexican descent, and made them take Communion last. According to historian Roberto R. Treviño, the Diocese of Galveston (the Diocese of Galveston-Houston from 1959), established Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, its first “Mexican” church, in 1912 and subsequent missions and parishes for ethnic Mexicans in response to increasing migration from Mexico that began in the 1910s and migration from rural Texas by Tejanos (Texans of Mexican descent), “so as not to offend Anglos accustomed to separation of the races.” Although Jim Crow legislation in Texas segregated whites and “Negroes,” and regarded blacks and Creoles of color as Negro, as historian Tyina L. Steptoe has argued in a study of Houston between the two world wars, Jim Crow did not mark “a single color line but several color lines that were constantly in flux.”²

Jim Crow laws regarded ethnic Mexicans as white, but they nevertheless faced segregation and discrimination to varying degrees, sometimes based on the hue of their skin, which varied considerably because most Mexicans had a mixture of white and Indian ancestry and some had African or Afro-Mexican forebears. “Local racial hierarchies,” Steptoe observes, “emerged that could both conform to the color line and ignore legal categories.” Although segregation laws did not apply to Catholic churches and schools because they were private institutions, in practice the Diocese of Galveston’s institutions accommodated and contributed to racial segregation and discrimination in forms that extended beyond a black-white binary and included ethnic Mexicans and Creoles of color. The diocese complied with the segregationist preferences of most of its Anglo laity, but it also accommodated the segregationist inclinations of ethnic Mexicans and Creoles of color towards those they considered black and allowed them to segregate others on their own initiative. Segregation in the Diocese of Galveston was thus shaped in some ways by ethnic Mexicans and Creoles of color, who were themselves subject to segregation inside and outside the church, as well as by the dominant Anglo group.³

This study of the Diocese of Galveston-Houston and desegregation addresses a significant gap in the literature on Catholics and desegregation by examining a diocese that by the mid-1960s had a greater black Catholic population (61,961) than even the Archdiocese of New Orleans (55,000) in neighboring Louisiana, the South’s most Catholic state. It also contributes to the civil rights history of Southeast Texas. Studies of the African American civil rights movement, desegregation, and African Americans in post-World War...