Desegregating Dixie: Southern Catholics and Desegregation, 1945-1980

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The research focuses on the response of African American and white Catholics in the American South to racial desegregation and inequality in the Catholic Church and secular society between 1945 and 1980. The time frame includes the emergence of the southern civil rights movement, its years of triumph, and its aftermath. As members of an expanding biracial denomination in the South that had traditionally faced hostility and suspicion from the Protestant majority, black and white, Catholics necessitate study. Existing scholarship suggests that as a hierarchical institution, the Catholic Church was far less constrained by substantial lay segregationist sentiment than the more democratic mainstream Protestant denominations. Sociologist E. Franklin Frazier suggested that for many black Catholics conversion was a means of expressing an upwardly mobile social status that differentiated them from the predominantly Baptist and Methodist southern black masses. Consequently African Americans held aloof from the civil rights movement and did not challenge racial discrimination within the Church. This research challenges these contentions, and explains the diversity of the Catholic experience. The papacy exhibited growing interest in African Americans in the 1930s, and United States bishops issued statements condemning racial discrimination in the 1940s, and segregation in 1958 and 1963. Some Catholic bishops in the peripheral South, such as Bishop Walters of Raleigh, ordered desegregation of parochial schools ahead of the Supreme Court's Brown state school desegregation ruling in 1954. However, other bishops, especially in the Deep South where white segregationist sentiment was greatest because of a relatively high black population, did not act until after the federal courts implemented Brown. Archbishop Rummel of New Orleans repeatedly postponed parochial school desegregation because of virulent opposition from state authorities and many lay Catholics. Rather than being passive, African American Catholics often challenged segregation by pressuring bishops to desegregate parochial schools, and many black Catholics also participated in civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s. The research investigates the strength of segregationist sentiment among southern white Catholics and the rationale segregationists developed. While a minority of Catholic segregationists advanced a biblical defence of segregation, most cited custom and tradition, separation of church and state, alleged communist infiltration or direction of the civil rights movement and the right to freedom of association. A minority of southern white Catholics supported integration and some formed interracial councils, assisted by the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice (NCCIJ), an unofficial group that maintained a Southern Field Office in New Orleans. The research analyses the impact of the NCCIJ's work, and statements condemning racial inequality and segregationist violence by the Vatican, Catholic bishops, the Catholic Committee of the South, and Catholic newspapers. Another focus is the involvement of predominantly white Catholic orders, and northern Catholic clergy and nuns in aiding African Americans and the civil rights movement. The study compares the response of southern Catholics to desegregation to that of southern and northern Protestants, and northern Catholics. While the statements of the Catholic hierarchy nationally and in the South were often ahead of those of Protestant bodies, local circumstances conditioned implementation of desegregation. The research analyses the process of southern Catholic desegregation, and considers African American and white perspectives. When hitherto racially distinct churches or schools merged, it was the black institution that the diocese closed.The study's conclusion accounts for the diversity of the Catholic experience of desegregation, and assesses the Catholic Church and race in 1980.