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2014 The Church of St. Benedict the Moor: Propagating and Contesting Black Catholicism in New York City, 1883-1920 Jeffrey Wheatley

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COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

THE CHURCH OF ST. BENEDICT THE MOOR: PROPAGATING AND CONTESTING

BLACK CATHOLICISM IN NEW YORK CITY, 1883-1920

By

JEFFREY WHEATLEY

A Thesis submitted to the Department of Religion in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2014 Jeffrey Wheatley defended this thesis on March 28, 2014. The members of the supervisory committee were:

John Corrigan Professor Directing Thesis

Amanda Porterfield Committee Member

Aline Kalbian Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The faculty at Florida State University provided me with the tools necessary to complete this project. Dr. John Corrigan provided support and pushed me to articulate a bolder and clearer argument. Dr. Amanda Porterfield’s enthusiasm for the metaphor of the corral helped me shape this project early on. Dr. Aline Kalbian provided thoughtful feedback on the vocabulary and implications of this work. Staff members at the Archives of the Archdiocese of New York and the New York Historical Society provided excellent aid in finding materials on the Church of St. Benedict the Moor. Kate Feighery and Rev. Michael Morris from the AANY deserve special thanks for their diligence, their kindness, and the ride to the Metro-North station in Yonkers. I eagerly await their new facility. Graduate school is a testament to the fact that research is and should be a social activity. A number of friends and colleagues have contributed to my scholarly development. I give special thanks to Michael Graziano, Charles McCrary, and Emily Clark for their thoughtful conversations and good humor. One cannot help but to become more critical and self-aware in the midst of such wonderful company. My partner Allison Walsh provided love and encouragement from afar. She did so despite her skeptical reflections on the dubious rituals of academia. When I was born my parents predicted that I would become a minister. Instead, I entered religious studies. Nonetheless, they have been nothing but loving and supportive of my research and teaching. Their constant encouragement for and interest in my education has provided me cheer and comfort. This thesis is dedicated to them and all of their efforts.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT v

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER ONE: A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL OVERVIEW 6

In Search of a Black Catholicism 7

The Catholic Church in America 12

New Questions in African American Religious History 14

Conclusion 16

CHAPTER TWO: ST. BENEDICT'S APPEAL 18

The Past: Crafting an Afro-Catholic History 21

The Present: Naturalizing Black Catholicism 28

The Future: The Urban Environment, Social Uplift, and Institution-Building 31

Conclusion 40

CHAPTER THREE: "THE SCHEME WAS EXPERIMENTAL!" 42

Demographics 43

Finances 46

Services 49

CONCLUSION: RACE, RELIGION, AND AUTHORITY 57

BIBLIOGRAPHY 63

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 68

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ABSTRACT

This thesis examines the Church of St. Benedict the Moor from 1883 to 1920. St. Benedict’s was the first black Catholic church in the North. I argue that supporters of the Catholic mission to African Americans sought to incorporate the assumptions of black religiosity in order to render Catholicism as a legitimately black religion. The institutional history of St. Benedict’s demonstrates the difficulties that the Catholic Church faced in attempting to overcome African American suspicion. A key contribution of this thesis is its approach to black Catholicism as a contested and propagated identity. Prompted by St. Benedict’s creation in New York, black Catholics, Irish priests, freethinking radicals, and Protestants all participated in a dialogue over the nature and function of black religion vis-à-vis Catholicism.

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INTRODUCTION

Nestled in the back of the 1908 dime novel The Bradys and the Chinese Fire Fiends was an odd vignette: Two young Irish girls, one of whom had apparently only “lately landed,” were walking through West Forty-third street the other day and the following scrap of their conversation was overheard by a woman who was close behind them. In front of the Catholic Church of St. Benedict the Moor the girls paused to read the name, and then glanced upward at the large figure of the saint which adorns the front of the structure. “Why, Mary,” exclaimed the “greenhorn,” clutching excitedly at her companion’s sleeve, “It looks like a black man!”, “Sure,” responded Mary composedly; “that’s a church for colored people.” “A black saint!” repeated the other, half under breath. “Well, and how manny more quare things will I hear of in this counthry, I’d like to know!” [sic].1

For many onlookers, anxious Protestant ministers, and curious journalists, the Church of St. Benedict the Moor in New York City was indeed a “quare thing” that demanded explanation. This was in large part due to the fact that many white and black Americans in the urban north normalized black religion as Protestant. Of course, there had always been Catholics who were black in New York. However, St. Benedict’s signaled a shift towards a black Catholic identity that suggested a past and future relationship in which “black” and “Catholic” modified each other. The mission pushed the possibility of a black Catholicity into the New York public. But what exactly did this black Catholicism entail? And what were its implications? This thesis explores the variety of New Yorkers’ responses to these questions from St. Benedict’s opening in 1883 to 1920, when public interest in the church had waned significantly. St. Benedict’s serves as the prism through which we can glimpse these responses. The Catholic Church’s interest in missionizing African Americans peaked in these four decades. I argue that a cadre of liberal Catholic priests and lay black Catholics sought to missionize African Americans by reading (or, more appropriately, misreading) the needs of the black community in order to incorporate these needs into St. Benedict’s missionary appeal. Although I believe that the hierarchy must be central to the story of a mission to African Americans, the hierarchy was one voice among many. Lay black Catholics, freethinking radicals, hostile Protestant ministers, and the liberal Irish priests all played a role in the propagation and contestation of a black Catholicism. Because of the co-constituted nature of racial and religious identities, the Catholic

1 The Bradys and the Chinese Fire Fiends; Or, Breaking Up a Secret Band (New York: Frank Tousey, 1908), 27.

1 mission to African Americans necessarily participated in the ongoing dialogue over the nature and function of black religion in an attempt to overcome the effects of the normalization of black religion as Protestant. The argument has two steps. First, I seek to demonstrate that supporters of Catholic missions to African Americans read black culture as desirous of what the Catholic Church could offer: a home that could provide order within a hostile and racist society. Protestantism, Catholics argued, had failed to do this. As a result the black community was left without an institutional center around which African Americans could organize and uplift themselves. Whatever inconsistencies with the history of the American Catholic Church’s relationship with African Americans beforehand, this conviction drove and shaped the mission. This conviction also fueled Catholic optimism in the potential of St. Benedict’s. Second, I seek to demonstrate that the hierarchy and its supporters had misread African American desire and their own church. According to the standards set by the rhetoric of the priests in the 1880s, the mission had failed by the early 1900s. Far from hoping to be rescued from their oppressive situation by an ostensibly universal church, African Americans desired to create and participate in a variety of black religious institutions that reflected and served the black community. The disjuncture between Catholic uniformity and black polyculturalism crippled the Catholic mission to African Americans in New York City. Despite the efforts of the Catholic hierarchy, the Catholic Church and African Americans by and large continued on divergent paths in the twentieth century. Although operating within multiple historiographies, this thesis primarily contributes to the historiography of black Catholics in the United States. I provide a narrative of a mission church that has not received substantial treatment in the existing literature. St. Benedict’s deserves study for three reasons. First, the church provoked widespread curiosity in a city that has been paramount in both Catholic and black history. Public interest in the mission is all the more remarkable considering the church’s small size. Second, New York’s robust print culture provides us with a substantial record of the dialogue prompted by the church. Third, the variety of religious groups in New York City and their interest in and objections to St. Benedict’s allow us to see clearly the co-constitution of race and religion around the turn of the twentieth century. Although black Catholics had existed in the Americas since the fifteenth century, St. Benedict’s presented itself and was received as a new black religion.

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Rather than approaching black Catholicism as a static set of beliefs and practices, I approach black Catholicism as a flexible identity that a variety of groups propagated and contested. The history of black Catholicism in the United States is usually one of both celebration and lamentation. Scholars such as Cyprian Davis, M. Shawn Copeland, and Diane Batts Morrow have celebrated the faith, perseverance, and devotion of some of the more exceptional black Catholics.2 They also have lamented the failure of the hierarchy to address American racism and to missionize and defend African Americans with the same care that they did other groups. Davis, who remains the leading scholar on black Catholicism, has attributed black Catholicism’s numerical marginalization in the United States to these failures. Basing my approach on the critical methods developed by figures such as Judith Weisenfeld, Jacob Dorman, and Curtis Evans, I seek to nuance these claims.3 I suggest that any historical treatment of black Catholicism must situate the historical actors within a field of religio-racial formations. In other words, religio-racial identities were never hermetically sealed. Racialized subjects formed and were formed by religious identities that co-operated and conflicted with one another. In the late nineteenth century, many liberal Catholics were very interested in missionizing African Americans. Although not free from racist beliefs and practices, these priests sought to make Catholicism appealing according to the norms of African Americans. Again, I assert that this project failed according to its own optimistic standards. By placing the burden solely on the Catholic hierarchy, scholars have erased the role of non-Catholic African Americans in engaging or resisting Catholic missions. Although there were clear power differentials, Catholic missions were necessarily dialogical. Black Catholicism was not simply the external expression of the deep internal faith of individual Catholics who were black. The Catholic hierarchy also played a role, even if it at times was a negative role against which lay black Catholics pushed. Black Catholicism was a socially-produced identity

2 See Cyprian Davis, The History of Black Catholics in the United States (New York: Crossroad, 1990); Uncommon Faithfulness: The Black Catholic Experience, edited by M. Shawn Copeland, LaReine-Marie Mosely, and Albert J Raboteau (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2009); and Diane Batts Morrow, Persons of Color and Religious at the Same Time: The Oblate Sisters of Providence, 1828-1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 3 See Curtis J. Evans, The Burden of Black Religion (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Judith Weisenfeld, Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929-1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); and Jacob S. Dorman, Chosen People: The Rise of American Black Israelite Religions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

3 that implicated race histories, naturalized assumptions about blackness, socio-economics, and, of course, theology. Black Catholic identity was created, rejected, and accepted on these terms. Accordingly, my investigation into formations of black Catholicism relies on the local context of the urban environment and the numerous representations of a black Catholic identity that were produced within this environment. I have attempted to collect sources that reflect the interactional nature of religio-racial formations. As with most historical projects exploring African American religions, the dearth of sources shapes this study. Newspaper accounts make up the bulk of sources on the institutional history and reception of St. Benedict’s. I construct Chapter Two with these accounts. Fortunately, reader interest in St. Benedict’s was high enough for newspapers to continue reporting on the mission well into the 1890s. Most of these articles were written anonymously. Public interest and coverage seems to have tapered off after 1900. In Chapter Three I utilize a number of sources from the Archives of the Archdiocese of New York. Most of the surviving documents for St. Benedict’s are financial in nature. I use the private correspondence of Irish priests John E. Burke and Richard L. Burtsell. Both priests played a central role in creating and serving St. Benedict’s. Although these two men were pivotal in the push to missionize African Americans, they provided less commentary on their black parishioners and race than might be supposed. I use fellow missionaries like John Slattery and lay black Catholics to fill in the gaps. Specifically I examine the Black Catholic Congresses in the 1880s and 1890s. These events provide the clearest glimpse into the optimism shared by both activist lay black Catholics and the overwhelmingly white hierarchy. I utilize secondary sources to speculate when the available primary sources leave something to be desired. Unfortunately, black voices in these sources are few and far between. With some exceptions (black freethinkers, lay members of the Black Catholic Congresses, Harriet Thompson), we can only get a glimpse at the black community that regularly attended St. Benedict’s. Judging from the donor rolls, women were some of the most supportive lay members. I have no doubt that they had a larger role than can be explored with what sources are available. It is left to other studies with stronger documentation to more fully elaborate on the role of lay black Catholic women and men. I divide this thesis into three chapters. Chapter One provides a literature review that situates this thesis within multiple historiographies. I unpack my metaphor of the corral to

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critique the insular state of sub-fields like black Catholic studies. Chapter Two excavates the appeal that supporters of the mission made to African Americans in order to explain the optimism that fueled the Catholic mission to African Americans. Supporters utilized three arguments to legitimate black Catholicism: (1) the history of Afro-Catholicism, (2) the ability of Catholicism to civilize and Christianize the more savage races, and (3) the institutional capabilities of the Catholic Church to organize and protect marginalized populations. The Catholic Church sought to become the central institution for a Catholicized African American population through these appeals. Chapter Three narrates the institutional history of St. Benedict’s. The inability of St. Benedict’s to bring about widespread conversion frustrated the early optimism and assumptions of the Irish priests. The demographic instabilities of the black population, the financial woes of the mission, and the inability of St. Benedict’s to establish a full-time school limited the efficacy of the mission. In a surprising twist, St. Benedict’s became but one part of a religious and intellectual hub in a network of black intellectuals. This cadre of black thinkers who praised St. Benedict’s and attended its lyceum included radical freethinkers like Hubert Harrison, Arturo Schomburg, and John E. Bruce, all of whom rejected the presuppositions of the Catholic Church. In a brief conclusion I reflect on the limited success of the mission and I explore the role that authority has played in the tensions between African Americans and Catholicism in the twentieth century.

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CHAPTER ONE

A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL OVERVIEW

The study of black Catholics is a generative one that forces the scholar to question the disciplinary divides that structure the study of American religious history. This is in large part due to the fact that the field’s subjects fall between disciplinary cracks. Black Catholics do not fit easily into the framework of African American religious history—much of which assumes, at least in the United States, some form of Protestantism—nor do black Catholics fit easily into American Catholic history—much of which has been studied with the assumptions and frameworks of Euro-American immigration, ethnicity, and whiteness. To engage in research on black Catholics and, more importantly to this study, conceptions of black Catholicism is to engage in an intersectional and potentially bricolage project. In this chapter I aim to situate this thesis within three historiographies. I examine the historiography of black Catholics, recent developments in American Catholic historiography, and new methodologies embedded in a number of monographs on African American religious history. My study of black Catholicism is made possible by these historiographies. All three developed within the context of the mid-twentieth-century pursuit to recover stories of the marginalized who had been conspicuously absent from most histories. In response to the flattening powers of consensus history, scholars began to emphasize groups that contested the powers and culture of an American “mainstream” (that is, white Protestant men). In this chapter I argue that the project of recovering marginalized voices has led to the construction of historiographical corrals that often leave the reader with the sense that the historical subjects existed with hermetically sealed worlds. Histories of black Catholics have rendered black Catholics as a tightly insular community. Similarly, scholars of American Catholics writ large have often corralled Catholic institutions, beliefs, and practices by focusing on the internal dynamics of the Catholic Church rather than seeking out contexts and interactions. Although I intend to braid these disparate historiographies together, I approach my sources with methodologies articulated by scholars of African American religion. As I will elaborate at the end of this chapter, I utilize frameworks provided by Curtis Evans, Jacob Dorman, and Judith Weisenfeld. The de-essentializing work of these scholars suggests a historically-heavy approach to exploring religio-racial formations as ever-changing and socially-

6 produced acts of identification. This is in contrast to an approach that seeks to uncover pure and essential identities. I describe this latter approach as corralling. I intend to explore the contestation and propagation of religio-racial identities that occurred through the interactions of different groups rather than generated by them solely. Most importantly, this thesis historicizes the dialogue between African Americans (whether Protestant, Catholic, humanist), Irish priests, and other interested groups. I hope that the concept of corralling and my intent to break open historiographical corrals represents a contribution that is useful to all three fields. Admittedly, disciplinary divisions are a necessity. These sub-fields do reflect very real divisions that have structured and are structured by racialized and religious groups. However, I advocate for a healthy skepticism regarding the rigidity of these corrals. We should view them as potent fictions operating in a nation built upon the interactions—however uneven, tragic, and violent—of a variety of groups identifiable by religious and racial markers. My contribution is to undo the work of these potent fictions by breaking open the corrals to examine the multiple forces that created formations—whether successful or not—of black Catholicism. The de-essentializing approach has led to the driving argument of this thesis: In the late nineteenth century the Catholic Church believed that it had the opportunity to make widespread gains by missionizing African American communities. Liberal Catholics read African Americans as in need of the Catholic Church’s ability to organize and protect within a racist and hostile American society. By exploring the dialogue over St. Benedict’s as it played out through New York City we can see how priests read the black community as desirous and how the black community by and large responded with a rejection of the Catholic Church’s claims to exclusivity. Before exploring the details of encounter between the Church and African Americans in New York City we must first unpack the historiographical assumptions that have undergirded univocal and essentialized histories of black Catholicism.

In Search of a Black Catholicism

Works on American black Catholicism are few and far between. However, scholars have become increasingly interested in black Catholics since the 1990s. This interest is part of the broader project of investigating marginalized and, to some extent, de-legitimated racialized and religious groups. This historiography has at least four reoccurring themes: (1) the goal to recover

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lost voices; (2) the predilection towards exploring ordained and lay devotional Catholics; (3) the examination of the disruptive power of Catholicism in that it provided powerless objects (both enslaved and oppressed African Americans) power and agency; and (4) the emphasis on the insularity of black Catholic communities. John T. Gillard was one of the first American scholars to publish extensively on black Catholic history. Gillard was a member of the Josephites, which since 1871 has been the Catholic organization most involved in missionizing African Americans. Gillard published Colored Catholics in the United States through a Josephite press in 1941, during which the hierarchy increasingly became interested in black Catholics. Gillard wrote that his research was to provide “a bird’s eye view of the whole terrain [that] will undoubtedly provide a better perspective for a greater coordination of effort at the most strategic lines of defence and attack.”4 Christ, Color & Communism (1937) was his attempt to convince “white Christians” to “look at color with the eyes of Christ” to see “not a menace but a soul.” Such a change in white perception was necessary to bring African Americans into the Catholic fold, thus allowing “the Communion of Saints on earth [to] save the Negro from the Communism of shysters from the Soviet.”5 Gillard's histories had an explicit utility for the Catholic Church and, he believed, the United States. The specter of Communism fostered a new urgency among the Catholic hierarchy in the mission to African Americans. In the past two decades a cadre of scholars have sought to recover a black Catholic past without explicitly producing works for the sake of Catholic missions. Cyprian Davis’s The History of Black Catholics in the United States (1990) is the starting point of this historiography. Davis published the survey with the intention to move beyond the “apologetic way” that Gillard had sought “to defend the church in its relationship to the black community.” Davis’s intended his survey to provide “the larger framework within which future historical research can develop.”6 A number of his arguments have made a lasting impact on the historiography of black Catholicism.

4 John T. Gillard, Colored Catholics in the United States: An Investigation of Catholic Activity in Behalf of the Negroes in the United States and a Survey of the Present Condition of the Colored Missions (Baltimore: The Josephite Press, 1941), 3. 5 John T. Gillard, Christ, Color & Communism (Baltimore: The Josephite Press, 1937), 128. 6 Davis, The History of Black Catholics in the United States, x-xi.

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First, like many of the figures studied in Chapter Two of this thesis, Davis traced the history of black Catholicism back to its African roots. He examines the early Christian church in Africa and emphasizes how black Christians in Ethiopia, Egypt, and Carthage were significant contributors to the Roman Catholic Church. In response to the normalization of black Protestantism (as discussed below), Davis argues that “all black history begins in Africa . . . the black Catholic community in America was no exception.”7 Second, Davis, unlike Gillard, emphasizes the Catholic hierarchy’s reluctance in forming a national program for the missionization of African Americans following emancipation. “This failure,” he wrote, “is one of the tragedies of American church history.” In the second half of the nineteenth century there was “a golden opportunity for a harvest of souls” that was squandered by a hierarchy more interested in repairing the unity of a normatively white nation than in the religious welfare of a people in need.8 Judging by the language of a “lost harvest,” which has been picked up by a number of recent studies on black Catholicism, there was never a greater potential for a successful Catholic mission to African Americans than in the decades following emancipation.9 Finally, the most important historiographical contribution lies in Davis’s emphasis on the religious women, early black priests, and activist-oriented lay Catholics that sought to carve out a niche for African Americans within a reticent Catholic Church. Black nuns in Baltimore and New Orleans played an important role in shaping the contours of black Catholicism through the education and care of numerous black children. Prominent lay Catholic Daniel Rudd propagated black Catholicism through the American Catholic Tribune, which utilized a prophetic rhetoric to emphasize the levels of salvation—material, social, and spiritual—that the Catholic Church offered African American communities. Davis celebrates the black Catholic community’s perseverance and laments the institutional neglect the community suffered in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Catholicism provided a haven for African Americans. At the same time the institution is to blame for the relatively small number of black Catholics. The story of black

7 Davis, The History of Black Catholics in the United States, 1. 8 Davis, The History of Black Catholics in the United States, 116. 9 Davis’s terminology of a lost harvest derives, as far as I can tell, from the Josephites, who began to publish the missionary magazine The Colored Harvest in 1888. The magazine still exists under the name The Josephite Harvest. For Davis’s use of the term see The History of Black Catholics in the United States, 116. For other works that explicitly utilize this framework see M. Shawn Copeland, “Introduction” in Uncommon Faithfulness: The Black Catholic Experience, edited by M. Shawn Copeland (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2009).

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Catholicism is a story of Catholicism putting its doctrine into practice as American Catholics came to realize that the church “teaches the doctrine of the equality of all peoples before God.”10 Black Catholics realized this theological truth even as many Euro-American Catholics refused it. In the past two decades a handful of scholars have taken up Davis’s call to provide more focused histories. Most continue, if also nuancing, his argument that the history of black Catholics is one of exceptionalism. Black Catholics were more faithful and devoted than a white Catholic hierarchy that was either negligent or explicitly hostile towards African Americans. These works have examined ordained black Catholics, or at least lay devotional societies, and they are primarily focused on the internal relationships of these black Catholic communities. Published in the same year as The History of Black Catholics, Stephen J. Ochs’s Desegregating the Altar: The Josephites and the Struggle for Black Priests, 1871-1960 (1990) situates the Josephite missions at the center of the development of a black Catholicity. The Catholic mission to African Americans was a top-down affair. Ochs argues that the attempt to train black priests was at the center of the Catholic Church’s mission to African Americans. There were ultimately not enough black Catholic priests to support a widespread and successful mission. Scholars have always turned to the parish in order to produce localized communal studies. In The Emergence of a Black Catholic Community: St. Augustine’s in Washington (1999), Morris J. MacGregor traces the development of a proud black Catholic tradition through a single parish. Although the social climate and race relations changed from generation to generation, the essence of the parish, he argues, remained the same: “The priests and people of St. Augustine’s have worked diligently and sacrificed much in pursuit of spirituality, knowledge, and self-empowerment.”11 MacGregor emphasizes the financial and socials problems embedded in black Catholic communities. More recently scholars have begun to investigate the role that Catholic women (white and black) played in the propagation of black Catholicism. In their article “The Feminine Face of Afro-Catholicism in New Orleans, 1727-1852” (2002), Emily Clark and Virginia Meacham Gould argue that religious women were more than a sign of Catholicism’s broader appeal to

10 Davis, The History of Black Catholics in the United States, 189. 11 Morris J. MacGregor, The Emergence of a Black Catholic Community: St. Augustine’s in Washington (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1999), 483.

10 people of African descent. In the tradition of Albert Raboteau’s analysis of African American meaning-making through religion, Clark and Gould argue that Afro-Catholic women “employed their religious affiliation to transform themselves from nearly powerless objects of coercion into powerful agents.”12 Black nuns, far more than the black laity or the priesthood, worked to bring African Americans into the Catholic fold through catechesis and baptism. Diane Batts Morrow’s examination of black nuns in Baltimore (2002) makes a similar argument. Morrow examines the rise of the Oblate Sisters of Providence in Baltimore through an African feminist lens. The Oblate sisters defied the antebellum categorization of black women as virtue-less. The sisters, “by associating in community as women religious and by executing their teaching ministry, defined themselves positively as a black sisterhood.”13 While Clark and Gould are more concerned about domains of power, Morrow emphasizes the moral statement that the sisters’ lives as religious women made to southern society. Emily Clark’s Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727-1834 (2007) examines the role of white Ursuline nuns in creating spaces of mobility and freedom for black Catholics in Louisiana. Clark takes the typical Catholic historical framework of oppression from without and beneficence within and adds revisionary frameworks of race, class, gender, and Atlantic history. She argues that Catholicism, as advocated by and representative of the Ursuline nuns of New Orleans, provided beneficent opportunities such as education and female empowerment to women regardless of race or class. Catholicism provided the Ursulines flexibility so that those of African descent could “maneuver within the rigid confines of the increasingly racist slave societies of the Americas.”14 Clark perhaps overstates her argument. The sisters, after all, were complicit in the slave society of the South. If the Ursulines offered an egalitarianism, it was of a limited kind. The historiography on black Catholicism has consistently emphasized the piety and endurance of African American parishioners, primarily by examining lay devotional societies, ordained Catholics, and nuns. Taken together these works suggest the following framework: a black Catholic tradition existed, even in the nineteenth century. Despite the disadvantages of

12 Emily Clark and Virginia Meacham Gould, “The Feminine Face of Afro-Catholicism in New Orleans, 1727- 1852,” in The William and Mary Quarterly 59, no. 2 (April, 2002), 412. 13 Morrow, Persons of Color and Religious at the Same Time, 3. 14 Emily Clark, Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of A New World Society, 1727-1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 162.

11 being within a negligent and, at times, racist Catholic hierarchy, black Catholics drew from their faith to provide themselves with humanizing agency within a hostile nation. According to Clark and Morrow, women especially found solace in devotional societies and female orders that praised their piety and disrupted American gender norms. This historiography celebrates black Catholics for creating something out of a system that sought to make them into nothing. At the same time, these histories overwhelmingly place the burden for the low yield (to adopt the organic metaphors of the historiography) among African Americans on priests, bishops, and archbishops who failed to address Catholic and American racism. My story of St. Benedict’s contributes to the broader story of black Catholics in two ways. First, it complicates the notion of the missed “golden opportunity for a harvest of souls” that has dominated the historiography since Cyprian Davis’s The History of Black Catholics in the United States. According to this narrative, the Catholic Church, due to its racist and negligent hierarchy, squandered the opportunity to missionize and support black Americans following the Civil War. There is no doubt some truth to this. The hierarchy, despite prodding from the Vatican, refused to formulate a national mission and did not outline a program for racial tolerance. However, this narrative conceals the dynamism that resulted when Catholics did seek to missionize blacks, who were not simply objects to be harvested but people who had their own conceptions of what constituted legitimate religion (which was almost always legitimated through a racial lens). Second, the historiography has too often corralled the hierarchy and black Catholic communities. Histories of black Catholicism either dismiss or diminish the dialogical nature required of any attempt to missionize African Americans. Because of the historiography’s tendency to corral its historical subjects we have missed the Church’s participation in ongoing discussions over the nature and function of black religion in the United States. Alongside the study of black Catholic communities, we should begin to explore historically the racial and religious conflicts that surrounded and, indeed, shaped these very communities.

The Catholic Church in America

Any exploration of a Catholic community must explore the Catholic hierarchy, which had the power and wealth to define and police the meanings of Catholicism. Even if there was only one self-described black priest in 1883, my study of black Catholicism relies on the historiography of American Catholicism to explain Catholic interest in missionizing African

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Americans. American Catholic historiography remains interested in the dichotomy that has defined it for decades: Romanism versus Americanism. Thankfully, Catholic history—which rarely shares theoretical and methodological discussions with American religious history—has begun to ask new questions that go beyond this disabling dichotomy. A brief historiographical map will help contextualize this development. In the mid-twentieth century scholars like John Courtney Murray emphasized the compatibility between American values and Catholic theology.15 In the 1970s and 1980s a crop of historians tweaked this approach and began to argue that the Church was overwhelmingly Europeanized until it became Americanized through immigration to the United States. Jay Dolan and Patrick Carey, for example, emphasize the ways in which the Catholic Church became more democratic in the early U.S. republic. American politics transformed American religions. However, their histories also trace the way in which a “siege mentality” quickly developed in the nineteenth century as Catholics sought to insulate themselves from hostile American influence.16 According to Dolan and Carey, this was a regrettable development. Most pertinent for this thesis is the historiographical shift advocated most clearly by Leslie Woodcock Tentler, who argues that Catholics “are thought to have inhabited a distinct and remarkably insular subculture” adding that the “extent to which these assumptions are warranted is certainly open to question.”17 Catholic historiography has been ghettoized or, to use my own terminology, corralled. Catholics seem to exist in a world of their own. I argue that whatever its relationship to “Americanism,” the American Catholic Church always operated within the context of American cultures, economics, and politics. We should seek out the mutual influences and acknowledge cultural distances without assuming a flattened Catholic (or American) liberalism, conservatism, or exceptionalism. A number of scholars have taken up Tentler’s call and are attentive to the definitions and implications of Catholicism and Americanism as they inform each other in the United States’ unique religious environment. They do so by avoiding essentialized understandings of

15 See John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition (Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 1960). 16 See Jay P. Dolan, In Search of an American Catholicism: A History of Religion and Culture in Tension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) and Patrick W Carey, People, Priests, and Prelates: Ecclesiastical Democracy and the Tensions of Trusteeism (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987). 17 Leslie Woodcock Tentler, “On the Margins: The State of American Catholic History,” American Quarterly 45, no. 1 (March 1, 1993), 105.

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Catholicism and Americanism. In Church and Age Unite!: The Modernist Impulse in American Catholicism (1992) R. Scott Appleby argues that a number of nineteenth-century Catholic intellectuals embraced American liberal and scientific sensibilities in an effort to modernize Catholicism. This liberalism provided one backdrop for the priests explored in this study. John McGreevy’s research also reflects Tentler’s push for more interactional histories. Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North (1996) utilizes the tools of urban sociology to demonstrate the role of the Catholic Church in shaping city relations and the role of religious spatial layerings in producing Catholic Euro-American tensions with African Americans. McGreevy’s goal “to understand Catholic racism, not simply to catalog it” is a useful dictum to keep in mind as we continue to examine the complicated and varied interactions between Catholics, the Catholic Church, and African Americans.18 The American Catholic Church has often sought to define itself as exceptional in one way or another. However, to do so the Church had to engage the assumptions embedded in American communities.

New Questions in African American Religious History

Between Gillard’s scholarship in the 1930s and Davis’s History of Black Catholics in 1990, African American religious history became a professional discipline. In the wake of the Civil Rights movement, histories of African American religion focused on the linkages between African beliefs and practices and Protestantism in America. Albert Raboteau’s Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (1978) became the paradigmatic work on African American religious history. Although Raboteau briefly noted the presence of black Catholics, his focus remained on Protestantism, which was more capable of accommodating African practices. He also admitted that “the history of black Catholics has yet to be written.”19 Nonetheless, questions over Africanisms, Protestantisms, and the nature of the black church dominated the field from the 1970s to the 1990s. Recently scholars have begun to examine

18 John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 5. Also of interest is Peter D’Agostino’s account of Italian American loyalty to the Papacy and their support for fascist Italy. See D’Agostino, Rome in America: Transnational Catholic Ideology from the Risorgimento to Fascism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). I remain unconvinced that we can assume a similar transnationalism among all American Catholics, but I take his critique of over-reaching claims for a Catholic Americanism. 19 Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 380 fn. 123.

14 alternative forms of African American religion.20 However, scholars have not only asked which groups should be the proper study of African American religious history, but how we should study them. In the past decade a group of scholars have called for a re-orientation of African American religious history. This new direction constitutes a shift from engaging in processes of legitimation (whether according to racial, religious, or feminist standards) to historicizing the assumptions of legitimacy themselves. This section focuses on three developments that have influenced this thesis: (1) the genealogies that unearth processes by which religion and race become naturalized, (2) the extrication of organic metaphors to describe social formations, and (3) the exploration of the legitimating mechanisms that make possible certain religio-racial identities. Central to this shift is Curtis Evans’ The Burden of Black Religion (2008), which examines the historical constructions of black religiosity through a genealogical approach. Evans examines the ways in which African Americans and white Americans have naturalized religiosity in African American bodies with various implications. He argues that it has been through different conceptions of black racial capabilities that “blacks were judged as fit or unfit for participation and inclusion in the nation.”21 Evans’s genealogy begins with evangelical Protestant abolitionists who rendered slaves as an inherently humble and Christian people. Evangelicals used the naturalized understanding of black religiosity as a justification for emancipation, thus creating a legacy that tied the fate of African Americans to evaluations of their religious tendencies that continued well into the twentieth century. Evans suggests that scholars go beyond the disabling dichotomies of protest/accommodation, agency/powerlessness, and legitimate/illegitimate that have informed many evaluations of black religions. Instead, we should embrace the “surprises, paradoxes, and ironies” that result from histories attentive to contingencies often obscured by processes of essentialization or naturalization.22 Along with the type of historical empiricism advocated by Evans, the field has become increasingly self-reflective about the language deployed to describe cultural transmission. In

20 Along with the ostensible compatibility between African practices and Protestant emphasis on lay participation works on African American religions have explicitly excluded black Catholics from analysis due to the dearth of black priests. For example, see Clarence Taylor, The Black Churches of Brooklyn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), xvi. 21 Evans, Burden of Black Religion, 5. 22 Evans, Burden of Black Religion, x.

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Chosen People: The Rise of American Black Israelite Religions (2013), Jacob Dorman critiques the organic language of “roots” that has been used to trace the lineages of African American religion to various locales or time periods (such as Africa or the experience of American slavery). “Roots” histories are problematic for two reasons. First, they posit a pure cultural formation that is passed down from generation to generation. Second, they obscure the constant work required in the maintenance of a culture by individuals situated in time and space. Certainly parents pass certain ideas on to their children, but as Dorman notes “people also pick up culture more obliquely or ‘horizontally’ from the playground and the street; from books, mass media, and dancehalls; and from that vast primordial soup of the Black Atlantic Dialogue, a source not bounded by heredity.”23 Despite the tendency of American religious rhetoric to suggest otherwise, individuals construct religious identity through a bricolage approach that is inevitably a “reblending of the already blended.”24 If Dorman’s notion of culture is too individualized and microscopic, Judith Weisenfeld’s research provides a more balanced approach that takes into account institutional power. Weisenfeld’s Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929- 1949 (2007) has called attention to the continuously contested boundaries of religiosity and race. This requires, Weisenfeld argues, an analysis of the religious and racial “legitimating mechanisms that help structure our lives in public and material ways as well as in more subtle and veiled ways of which we are sometimes hardly aware.” 25 Specifically she examines how Hollywood produced films that rendered African American religious expressions as childish and overly-emotional. Although always contested, Hollywood had the capital, authority, and popular form of media to define black religiosity for many Americans.

Conclusion

Placing these historiographies in conversation makes this project possible. The histories of black Catholics have explored the racism of the Catholic hierarchy and the attempts of African Americans to reconcile their racial identity with their religious identity. Research on American Catholics in general has begun to examine not just American anti-Catholicism or the siege

23 Dorman, Chosen People, 7. 24 Dorman, Chosen People, 186. 25 Weisenfeld, Hollywood Be Thy Name, 4.

16 mentality of American Catholics, but the influences of Catholicism beyond the boundaries of those in communion with it. African American religious history has taken a turn towards social constructivism with the intent to demonstrate that even the most naturalized and personalized identities are socially produced. Whether used by historical subjects or scholars, organic and natural metaphors obscure the constant work required in the propagation and contestation of identities. Step one is to acknowledge that religio-racial identities are the product of historically contingent social forces. Step two, I propose, is to historically examine the specific strategies involved in the legitimation of religio-racial identities and the contestation that inevitably follows. I suggest that to do this we need to break open the corrals of these historiographies to examine how black Catholics, Irish priests, black Protestants, and various onlookers participated in a dialogical web over the meanings and implications of being African American, being Catholic in America, and the connections or disconnections between Catholic and African American communities.

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CHAPTER TWO

ST. BENEDICT’S APPEAL

When the Church of St. Benedict the Moor first opened its doors on November 18, 1883 more than 1500 black residents flocked to the procession and mass. Less than half of them fit in the building. The rest spilled into the street. From the pulpit Irish priest Richard L. Burtsell proclaimed that “it was a happy augury that coincident with the dedication of the church of the colored Catholic America should begin to reckon time upon a new standard.”26 That Sunday the United States had adopted the four continental time zones, ushering in, literally, a new time. Burtsell and other proponents of black Catholicism heralded the dedication as the dawn of a new era, one in which the Catholic Church would at long last bring black Americans into the Catholic fold. The spectacle attracted the attention of Catholics, non-Catholics, and reporters eager to cover the event after weeks of advertising it in their newspapers.27 The mission, as the priests hoped and a New York public pondered, was to serve as the turning point in a history of neglect. An optimism lay at the foundation of the North’s first black Catholic church. However, St. Benedict’s was created within and for a black community that had a stake in defining and protecting legitimate religion from illegitimate religion. Many black and white Americans believed that Protestantism was the true black religion. Three mechanisms functioned to legitimate black Protestantism. First, the black community had a stake in its Protestant churches due to the history of Methodist and Baptist abolitionism and missionizing. Second, black Protestantism was legitimated through its naturalization. African Americans, many Protestants argued, had natural qualities that were conducive to the Protestant religion. Finally, discussions about racial uplift in the late nineteenth century hinged upon conceptions of the black church. Even if the terminology of the black church was not yet commonly used, those interested in social causes assumed that the social welfare of black Americans rested upon the ability of Protestant institutions to organize, unify, and fight for equality.

26 “St. Benedict the Moor’s,” New York Globe, November 24, 1883. 27 Newspapers that sought a black audience like the New York Globe took a special interest in St. Benedict’s. White newspapers like the New York Herald¸ New York Times, New York Sun, and others also tracked the progress of the mission. Its opening was also remarkable enough to appear in papers published in Cincinnati, New Orleans, and Boston.

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Within this relatively adverse environment, St. Benedict’s supporters had to produce reasons for why Catholicism could be a legitimate black religion according to the assumptions of black religiosity already in place. To do so, the supporters of St. Benedict’s participated in the ongoing dialogue over the nature and function of black religion. Black Catholics, Irish priests, Protestant ministers, and, as Chapter Three will explore, Harlem radicals all played a role in contesting and propagating black Catholicism in New York through this discourse. Whatever the systematic inequalities and imperial aims, mission work has never been a one-way flow of information, capital, or people. There necessarily is a dialectic between missionaries, the missionized, and the potentially missionized, not to mention other groups that may have a stake in any one of these three.28 Acts of interpretation, hidden assumptions, and contradictions abound in their exchanges. For the purposes of this thesis I employ the term “dialogue” to capture the dialectical process involved in the production of religious and racial identities. Bear in mind that this dialogue, like the broader publics of the late nineteenth century, was not necessarily civil, it was not equally accessible to all, and even for those who were included to participate, not all had equal clout.29 Nonetheless, I believe that there were multiple actors participating in the discourses undergirding and surrounding St. Benedict’s. Anchored by the assumptions of religio-racial identity, this dialogue operated on multiple levels. For the sake of organizing this chapter, I have parsed the dialogue into three distinct, but interrelated, levels: the past, the present, and the future. St. Benedict’s attempt to legitimize itself as a religio-racial identity was in part dependent on a narrative of the past that emphasized an Afro-Catholic tradition that transcended the black experience in the United States. Stories about Africans like Saint Benedict the Moor functioned to emphasize the Church’s care over Africa and the religious possibilities of those born from slavery. In regards to the present, St. Benedict’s made an appeal based on the naturalized religio-racial characteristics of black Americans. Black religion was not viewed as socially produced, but as something inherent to individual black bodies. Protestants and Catholics clashed over whether this nature lent itself to Catholicism or

28 This approach is a distillation of a number of works on missions and cultural encounters. For a few, see Derek Chang, “’Marked in Body, Mind, and Spirit’: Home Missionaries and the Remaking of Race and Nation” in Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas, edited by Henry Goldschmidt and Elizabeth McAlister (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 133-156 and Colin G. Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America, Second Edition (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2013). 29 On the exclusionary function of American publics, see, among many, Tracy Fessenden, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007) and Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005).

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Protestantism. Finally, St. Benedict’s made its appeal based on its ability to stabilize and order urban populations that many Catholics believed were hindered by their fracturing. Black Catholic advocates and St. Benedict’s priests believed that the mission could function like Euro- American parishes, which sought to protect ethnic and racial interests from the hegemonic power of the nation’s renewed white Protestantism.30 The situation in New York was unique. We can gain a sense of how St. Benedict’s differed from other formations of black Catholicism by using the situation in Louisiana as a foil. Unlike many Protestants in eighteenth-century British colonies, French Catholics in the Americas more often than not catechized slaves. Although the Catholic hierarchy did not protest slavery, Catholicism provided, as Emily Clark asserts, “spaces for alternative interpretations of social and racial order.”31 The Catholic sacrament of matrimony, for example, provided Catholic slaves a compelling argument that they used to prevent their families from being separated in the slave trade. The Church supported slavery, but Catholicism also provided the means through which African Americans could make appeals to freedom. To provide a radical example from the Caribbean, Toussaint Louverture, who was Catholic, proclaimed Catholicism as the official establishment within the black Haitian republic. This reflected Louverture’s belief that Catholicism provided the equality of all people. It also reflected his desire for Haiti to gain international recognition.32 Protestantism, not Catholicism, dominated African American communities in most American regions, including New York. When African Americans and abolitionists made arguments for emancipation and civil rights, they did so through a Protestant framework that emphasized freedom of conscience and the rights of Christians. By the late nineteenth century Protestantism dominated the institutions of black religion in the North and much of the South. Protestant suspicion towards Catholics was part of this evangelical heritage.33 Catholic missions to African Americans entered into a religious field dominated by assumptions that linked

30 See Edward J. Blum, Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007). 31 Clark, Masterless Mistresses, 162. 32 See Julia Gaffield, “Complexities of Imagining Haiti: A Study of National Constitutions, 1801-1807,” Journal of Social History 41, no. 1 (October 1, 2007): 81–103. 33 For the political aspects of this suspicion, see Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (New York: Macmillan Company, 1938). For anti-Catholicism in popular literature, see Susan M. Griffin, Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

20

Protestantism and African American freedom.34 In order to be successful they would have to decouple Protestantism and African American freedom. A group of liberal Irish-American priests, who were referred to as the Accademia, first conceived of St. Benedict’s in the 1870s. The priests sought to collapse the distance between black Americans and Catholicism through the creation of a specifically (though, as we will see, not exclusively) black church. Richard L. Burtsell, John E. Burke (who would be the leading priest of St. Benedict’s for almost three decades), Thomas O’Keefe, and other associated priests, all of whom were white and Irish American, struggled to create and expand the church. Many evangelical Protestants, who published some of the more popular New York newspapers, were ambivalent, if not hostile, to the idea of the Roman Catholic Church missionizing blacks. Black ministers were especially concerned and responded accordingly. During all of this, black Catholics, both in New York and elsewhere, had their own thoughts about the Church’s relationship with black America. As Chapter Three will demonstrate, St. Benedict’s legacy was less than what the hyperbolic rhetoric suggested. Nonetheless, the creation of the mission propelled the notion of a black Catholic identity into the New York public. In response, groups spun a surprisingly dense web of dialogue over the nature and implications of this identity.

The Past: Crafting an Afro-Catholic History

In the late nineteenth century there was a pressing need among many black Americans to craft race histories. Evangelical Protestants had the most currency when it came to compelling historical narratives, most of which were anchored in the experience of slavery and emancipation. Despite the relatively few abolitionists in the antebellum period, many Americans, especially in the urban North, memorialized evangelicalism as the champion of abolitionism and the Christianization of emancipated blacks. New York’s long history of independent black Methodist and Baptist churches granted a legitimacy to the still-existing churches. New York organizations like the Zion Publishing House, which was run by the American Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and which served as the meeting place for an interdenominational

34 See Elizabeth Fenton, Religious Liberties: Anti-Catholicism and Liberal Democracy in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 103-120. Fenton explores how American Protestants rendered black Catholic republicans like Toussaint Louverture as Protestant in order to preserve their ideological connections between Protestantism, freedom, and democracy.

21 condemnation of St. Benedict’s in 1883, produced histories of these churches that attested to their dedication to true religion and black social justice.35 These Protestant institutions had the capital and legitimacy to produce histories of black religion that were never solely descriptive, but prescriptive as well, even if not explicitly so. When it came to race histories, the Catholic Church in America lacked the currency of evangelical Protestantism. The Church, obviously, lacked a history of independent black congregations. The hierarchy’s response to abolitionism was for the most part apathetic and occasionally hostile. The fact that abolitionists were typically critics of the Catholic Church and viewed it as one of two of the enslaving institutions threatening the Christian (i.e., Protestant) nature of the United States, even for Catholics with abolitionist views. Pope Pius IX’s letter to Jefferson Davis in 1863 did not help. The Pope referred to Davis as the “Honorable President of the Confederate States of America.” Commentators, many of whom already had anti-Catholic inclinations, interpreted the letter as Papal support for the Confederacy.36 In New York specifically, the fact that the Irish dominated the Catholic hierarchy exacerbated the tensions. A distrust permeated not just black Protestants but black Catholics as well. As future St. Benedict’s congregant Harriet Thompson wrote to Pope Pius IX in 1853, “most of the Bishops and priests in this country is [sic] either Irish or descended from Irish and not being accustomed to the black race in Ireland they can’t think enough of them to take charge of our souls. Hence it is a great mistake to say that the church watched with equal care over every race and color, for how can it be said they teach all nations when they will not let the black race mix with the white.”37 The reluctance among many of the Irish to fight in the Civil War for the purpose of ending slavery turned into a series of violent riots in 1863, during which a number of blacks were lynched, a black orphanage was burned to the ground, and a number of Irishmen were killed. Similar, albeit less drastic, conflicts continued into the twentieth century.38

35 For example, see J. W. Hood, One Hundred Years of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (New York: A.M.E. Zion Book Concern, 1895). 36 John McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2003), 87-88. 37 Harriet Thompson to Pope Pius IX, October 29, 1853, in “Stamped with the Image of God”: African Americans as God’s Image in Black, ed. Cyprian Davis and Jamie Phelps (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2003), 31. 38 Although no conflict matched the damage of the Civil War Draft Riots, the fact that the Irish increasingly dominated the New York police force exacerbated the situation for black Americans. See Marcy Sacks, Before Harlem: The Black Experience in New York City Before World War I (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 85-106.

22

Historical narratives helped to solidify the connection between black identity and Protestantism. Black and white Protestants constructed narratives that rendered Protestantism as the antithesis of the institution of slavery. Methodists and Baptists had sought to Christianize slaves despite the fears of planters. Histories of independent black churches in the North also legitimated black Protestantism by connecting Protestantism to freedom.39 Although later histories (and current historiography) would emphasize the few American Catholic abolitionists, there were few histories that did so in the nineteenth century.40 The discourse prompted by St. Benedict’s did not emphasize the intersections of Catholicism and black America, but the discourse did narrate a broader history that emphasized the African contributions to the Church. Sylvester Johnson has provided a useful perspective for understanding the growth of black histories that traced religio-racial identities back to Africa. Johnson explores how twentieth-century new religious movements such as the Moorish Science Temple, the Nation of Islam, and various Ethiopic organizations “asserted [that] blacks were a people with peoplehood, with history and heritage that transcended the space and time of the American experience of slavery and racism.”41 In part prompted by St. Benedict’s, Catholic books, poems, and newspaper articles engaged in a similar project. Catholics interested in missionizing African Americans crafted narratives that emphasized the mutual influence between the Church and Africans going as far back as the third century CE. These histories functioned to demonstrate the potential of Catholic missions to black Americans in the late nineteenth century. The most obvious symbol of this Afro-Catholic history adorned the front of the mission. Saint Benedict the Moor, whom the Irish girls in this thesis’ introduction’s vignette found so odd, was the patron saint of Africa and African Americans. The few pre-1883 examples of Saint Benedict’s hagiography made little to no explicit comment on the situation of American blacks. Among these works was Jacques Allibert’s Life of St. Benedict Surnamed ‘The Moor,’ The Son

39 See Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Setting Down the Sacred Past: African-American Race Histories (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010). 40 For an example of a more ecumenical abolitionism, see Andrew Stern, “Southern Harmony: Catholic-Protestant Relations in the Antebellum South,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 17, no. 2 (July 1, 2007): 165–190. 41 Sylvester Johnson, “The Rise of Black Ethnics: The Ethnic Turn in African American Religions, 1916–1945,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 20, no. 2 (July 1, 2010): 125–163.

23 of a Slave, which Giuseppe Carletti translated into English in 1875.42 However, the New York mission prompted a shift towards directly relating Saint Benedict to black Americans. A week before the opening of St. Benedict’s, the New York Globe, in one of its few positive references to the mission, ran an article that mentioned that “the church is to be placed under the protection of St. Benedict the Moor; the Negro would be the proper title, as he was a full blooded Negro . . .” Newspaper articles and the hierarchy were careful to emphasize that just because The label “moor,” which has always been a nebulous designation, typically marked someone as having an Arabic background and was often contrasted with the racialized black.43 Saint Benedict was, they asserted, fully “negro,” and thus racially the same as contemporary black Americans.44 It concluded by noting that “Even those who differ from the Catholic Church cannot but admire its wisdom in holding up before her children as patterns, Saints, heroes of every tribe and color and race, as well as of every condition of life.”45 Saint Benedict was not the only one. Other Catholic figures born in Africa were also mentioned. Following the confirmation of twenty-five blacks who had joined St. Benedict’s, Archbishop Corrigan delivered an address that gave a history of theologians St. Augustine and Tertullian, both of whom were born in Carthage. As the New York Herald reported, the Archbishop noted that “the entire Catholic world is under a debt of inextinguishable gratitude to them, and when dealing with Africans of to-day all Catholics would recollect what the former members of the race had done for the Church.”46 This message, it seems, was meant for the Irish Catholics as much as the black community. Catholics used hagiographical works on St. Benedict to frame the black American experience into the twentieth century. Consider William Livingston’s poem “Saint Benedict the Moor,” which was published in 1914. Livingston tells the story of a sixteenth-century saint with language that would appeal to African Americans struggling in New York City in the wake of emancipation and the failure of Reconstruction.

42 Jacques Allibert, Life of St. Benedict Surnamed ‘The Moor,’ The Son of a Slave, translated by Giuseppe Carletti (Philadelphia: Peter F. Cunningham & Son, 1875). 43 Jacob Rama Berman, American Arabesque: Arabs and Islam in the Nineteenth Century Imaginary (New York: New York University, 2012), 65-69. 44 As Audrey Smedley argues, race developed as a meaningful way for classifying human groups among English colonists in the seventeenth century. See Smedley, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview, Third Edition (Boulder: Westview Press, 2007). 45 “Sketch of Saint Benedict the Moor,” New York Globe, November 10, 1883. The Globe would become The Freeman in 1884 and then The New York Age in 1887. 46 “Confirmation at St. Benedict’s,” New York Herald, May 12, 1884.

24

To the Convent gate, near Palermo town, A young lay brother came; His skin was black and his garments poor, But the monks had heard his name. They knew how blameless his life had been, How chaste were all his ways, For the fair Sicilian land was filled With his glory and his praise

They took him into their heart of hearts And blessed the Lord who gave To their humble home this saintly youth, The son of a negro slave. And their love increased as years went on, And their veneration grew, As they saw his wonderful face ablaze With the Christ-light shining through.

He had always sought for the lowest place— The kitchen was now his choice— Where his soul could glow with a love divine And his humble heart rejoice. But the monks were men whose souls were free From the world’s unchristian pride, And they begged their colored cook to be Their Guardian and their guide.

O Church of God! ‘tis in you alone All nations and races meet, To kneel as her children side by side At the dear Lord’s sacred feet. ‘Tis in you alone no lines are drawn That would keep men’s souls apart, For you to lead them all to the fount of love In the Saviour’s bleeding heart.

O saint of the kitchen poor and bare! Look down from the heavens and see Your trampled race in the menial’s place, Though the law declares it free.

You loved to obey when others ruled In a saintly soul's retreat, And the monks you served were Christ-like men Who would kneel to kiss your feet. But the arrogant lords who rule to-day

25

In purse-proud, fatuous pride, Look down with scorn on brothers for whom Their suffering Saviour died. And the weak, complacent world goes on With never a word of blame, Nor a shout of wrath to wipe it out, As our country's only shame.47

Livingston’s poem was tailored to the black community in a number of ways. His emphasis on Saint Benedict’s work as a cook, his service to others, and his poverty would likely resonate with many blacks in early twentieth-century New York. In the 1880s and 1890s, many younger blacks who had migrated to the urban North would also have been born of parents who were enslaved. Despite his tattered clothes and black skin, Saint Benedict was blameless and, through his humility and devotion, became venerated among the Italian Franciscans. An 1896 article in the New York Evangelist best captured the sentiment: “In Saint Benedict the Moor, the negro race is assured that it may reach the highest pinnacle of natural and supernatural virtue.”48 So despite the “trampled race” continuing to live in an unjust nation, Saint Benedict was used as a relevant figure who made poverty a virtue and showcased the Church’s willingness to recognize such virtue. Catholics like Livingston regarded the Church as a universal institution that did not recognize racial or social divisions. All were equal before the Church of God. The Irish priest Burtsell also emphasized this. An 1883 letter to the New York Globe from a writer in Raleigh questioned the egalitarian nature of the Catholic Church, arguing that St. Benedict’s was the product of racist segregation. Burtsell responded: “the Catholic Church is wise enough to recognize facts even when unpleasant; she does not expect to remedy all evils in a day or a year.” However, due to the hostility towards blacks in other ethnic parishes, St. Benedict’s was necessary to provide a space where they “will know that they are at home.” It is one of the “great practical truths which shows how in the Catholic Church any line of separation must be speedily obliterated.” Burtsell goes on to quote from Harvard historian Joseph Henry Allen, who wrote that the Church of the Middle Ages was an egalitarian institution, “before which all differences of social level absolutely disappeared. Emperor or king, peasant or serf, priest or noble, it knew

47 William Livingston, “St. Benedict the Moor” in Poems for Loyal Hearts (New York: P.J. Kennedy & Sons, 1914), 111-113. 48 No title, New York Evangelist, August 20, 1896.

26 men only as equal subjects of its spiritual empire. It declared the state of slavery impossible for a Christian, and did in fact practically abolish slavery in Europe by embracing all ranks and conditions within its fold.”49 The color line was lamentable, but Burtsell believed that the larger history of Catholicism proved its dedication to the erasure of social and racial divisions, even as it had to sometimes embrace racial division. Although the priests emphasized the universalizing power of the Church, black Catholics utilized their own narratives to suggest otherwise. This became especially clear at the four Black Catholic Congresses held between 1889 and 1894. Although supported by some of the more liberal members of the Church hierarchy, the congresses, which were modeled after German and Belgian lay congresses, were primarily the product of well-to-do lay black Catholics like the journalist Daniel Rudd, Boston’s Robert L. Ruffin, and others.50 They sought to provide a platform for black Catholics to air their grievances and discuss the future of black Catholicism in the United States. The New York delegation included members of the black laity along with Burke. Black lay member Robert Wood, for instance, became the head of the Committee on Grievances among Colored Catholics.51 Publishing in New York newspapers, Wood railed against Jim Crow segregation in Catholic institutions and chronicled the abuses blacks had faced within the Church, especially in the South. For instance he notes how one black man in St. Augustine, Florida refused to give up his seat in the front pews. The usher called for a policeman who “threatened to blow his brains out if he did not get out of that seat.” Wood notes that the man had brought a Protestant friend of his to the church with the hope that she might convert. “The lady,” Wood noted, “is still a Protestant.” He concluded that although “many blamed public opinion” for these abuses, “I tell every Bishop or priest who discriminates against, or permits discrimination against colored Catholics in his diocese or church, that he is either vicious or a

49 “Consistency of the Catholic Church,” New York Globe, December 22, 1883. Burtsell was especially pleased to utilize these quotes from Allen due to his suspicious stance towards the Catholic Church as a tyrannical institution. 50 Davis, History of Black Catholics, 171. Rudd published The American Catholic Tribune—a black Catholic newspaper—out of Cincinnati. See Gary B. Agee, A Cry for Justice: Daniel Rudd and His Life in Black Catholicism, Journalism, and Activism, 1854-1933 (Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 2011). 51 Robert N. Wood, “The Treatment of Colored Catholics by the Church,” New York Sun, January 29, 1894; Archbishop Michael Corrigan Collection, 4; Corrigan Clippings; Archives of the Archdiocese of New York, St. Joseph’s Seminary, Dunwoodie. (Hereafter abbreviated AANY.)

27 coward.”52 Wood and other vocal black Catholics like Rudd utilized a symbiotic Afro-Catholic history to critique the condescension and segregation suffered by blacks within the American Catholic Church. Despite the difficulties that African Americans experienced within the Church, the Black Catholic Congresses generally projected a bright future, in part due to the ancient history between Africans and the Church. The first congress made a statement to recognize “the admirable and remarkable efforts thus far accomplished for the benefit of the African race, either in this country or on the African continent, by the various religious orders of the Catholic Church.”53 At the third congress, journalist and black Catholic Robert Ruffin argued that “unless some new and vigorous departures are soon made by the Protestant Church at large, the great mass of the people of this country will indeed be absorbed by the Catholic Church.”54 Few supporters of St. Benedict’s would deny the racism practiced by lay and clerical Catholics. Liberal supporters of missionizing African Americans utilized histories of Catholicism that went beyond the examples of the United States to distance themselves from the race problem in the American Church.

The Present: Naturalizing Black Catholicism

The dialogue over black religiosity did not rely solely upon religious and racialized histories. St. Benedict’s was enmeshed in a dialogue that pivoted on notions of what constituted natural black religiosity. Both evangelical Protestants and socially active Catholics were especially interested in laying out the implications of these attributes in the missionizing field. Did natural black religion—whatever its content—lend itself towards Protestantism or Catholicism? Curtis Evans’ genealogy of black religion provides a useful framework for understanding the historical contingencies that led to religion being naturalized in blacks. In the eighteenth century the characteristics of African descendants were primarily attributed to their surroundings. Society, ecology, and climate all played a role. In the early nineteenth century, however,

52 “The Treatment of Colored Catholics by the Church,” New York Sun, January 29, 1891. I found this article in the Archives of the Archdiocese of New York in a box of pamphlets and clippings that Archbishop Michael Corrigan kept. 53 Congress of Colored Catholics of the United States, Three Catholic Afro-American Congresses (New York: Arno Press, 1978), 71. 54 Congress of Colored Catholics of the United States, Three Catholic Afro-American Congresses, 141.

28

American social theories began to shift. Racial difference became innate as opposed to shaped by the environment. The attributes of blackness, as variously defined, were located within black bodies. Evans’ analysis of romantic racialism is important for our purposes. Romantic racialists—many of whom were abolitionists like Harriet Beecher Stowe—argued that blacks were uniquely religious (that is, Christian) in their emotional and tender nature. Following the Civil War, this discourse took a negative turn and black emotionality became a liability according to many. After emancipation many white (and occasionally black) Americans interpreted black religiosity as either a socially impotent humility or a threatening excess of emotionalism. Whatever the diagnosis of black religion, most Americans believed that it crippled the ability of African Americans self-govern. The naturally religious African American was a popular stereotype in the New York public. This was especially the case due to New York’s abolitionist heritage. New York newspapers often printed reflections on this subject. In 1895 The Independent, which had an evangelical bent and had been a prominent abolitionist paper, published the article “The Negro in his Relations to the Church.” It stated that the black (note the singular noun) “does not turn aside to follow the erratic turns of little coteries of religionists. Neither does he show a preference for the Roman form of Christianity . . . He is a devout Baptist and an enthusiastic Methodist. He loves these denominations and seems to find in them an atmosphere more congenial to his warm, sunny nature, and fuller scope for his religious activity than other communions.”55 The language was vague, but its function was not. The popularity of black Methodists and Baptists was the result of an inherent “warm, sunny nature” that evangelical churches could easily incorporate. Although evangelical Protestants had the most currency when it came to making these types of naturalizing claims, Catholics interested in missionizing blacks were also drawn to these arguments. None more so than John Slattery. Slattery was a priest with the Josephites, which was the largest organization dedicated to missionizing black Americans. Consider the following circular, which had been sent to at least Archbishop Corrigan, if not Burke as well:

55 H. K. Carroll, “The Negro in His Relations to the Church,” The Independent ... Devoted to the Consideration of Politics, Social and Economic Tendencies, History, Literature, and the Arts (1848-1921), December 19, 1895. Congregationalist Henry C. Bowen was the current editor of The Independent. Former editors included Henry Ward Beecher and other abolitionists dedicated to the Christianization of African Americans. See Louis Filler, “Liberalism, Anti-Slavery, and the Founders of the Independent,” The New England Quarterly 27, no. 3 (September 1, 1954): 291–306.

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Notwithstanding many bad traits, the offsprings of the ignorance, neglect, and degradation, both intellectual and moral, which are the heirlooms of slavery, those benighted millions are well disposed towards the better gifts of faith. An experience of fourteen years of missionary work among the Negroes has convinced me that they are naturally fond of religion.

Of course, Catholicism was especially suitable to black Americans. Slattery continued, “our holy religion, which re-energized the tottering fabric of the Roman Empire and made of the wild, barbaric hordes the civilization of Europe, is well able to impart a healthy religious and moral status to the colored people.”56 Reflecting a popular view of blacks in the North, Slattery believed that despite the degradation of slavery, an ember of natural religiosity had persevered. This religious energy could be shaped by the guidance of the Church, helping “civilize” the black population. Supporters of St. Benedict’s shared these beliefs. Slattery probably influenced the language they used. Slattery, after all, was an occasional visitor to St. Benedict’s and often wrote to Burke and Burtsell.57 Burke once wrote that “as the negro is naturally of a sentimental temperament, greater results can be obtained by appealing to this sentiment.” This appeal required “plenty of missions, processions with banners and regalia, in a word apply the truth of the church in as concrete a manner as possible.”58 Rather than emphasizing catechism or reason, Burke believed that Catholic objects and performances could attract African Americans. Racial difference informed Burke’s approach. Newspaper accounts of St. Benedict’s opening emphasized the use of objects and color in the procession. None more so than the New York Globe’s report on the dedication. It described the “golden torch” lifted by the master of ceremonies; the “snow-white table and tabernacle strongly marked against a background of gold”; and the “festoons of evergreens” that feel from the ceiling. Bishop O’Farrell of Trenton wore “gold embroidered robes” and “carried a long golden staff.” The sermons were secondary to the visual and ritual display of the procession. This was not an endorsement. The article was condemnatory and agreed with the Protestant ministers who “sought to neutralize its attempts to make conversions among the colored people”

56 “An Appeal for his Seminary to Care for the Colored,” January 6, 1892; Archbishop Michael Corrigan Collection, 4; Corrigan Letters; G-88, 12. 57 Ochs, Desegregating the Altar, 76. 58 John E. Burke to Giovanni Bonzano, March 8, 1913, Del. Ap. U.S.A., II, 160b/1 (1911-14/1919), Condizione dei negri in Davis, History of Black Catholics, 202. Unfortunately, this document is difficult to access. I am forced to rely on Cyprian Davis’ quotations.

30 by arguing that the church was “a snare of the most subtle nature.”59 The emphasis on the material artifacts of the procession were part of the subtle snare. Protestant critiques of Catholicism in the late nineteenth century continued to leverage the charge of idolatry, even as Protestant churches had begun to adopt architectures, aesthetics, and technologies similar to those used by Catholics.60 Protestant and Catholic commentators disagreed on what constituted legitimate religion and what the difference was between a “snare” and an appeal. However, they agreed upon a naturalized understanding of black religiosity. Blacks were viewed as inherently sentimental, perhaps excessively so. “The problem,” Curtis Evans writes, “became how to explain and rectify the situation. Northerners generally argued that education and white influence (from the North and from the ‘liberal’ South) would be of inestimable value in helping blacks shed the deadweight of their slave-ridden past.”61 Black thinkers and religious leaders had similar, albeit less condescending, views. As Evans argues, W.E.B. Du Bois shaped the discourse of the black church, which was then referred to as the “Negro Church.” Evans summarizes the emerging concept of the black church as a singular institution tasked with “uplifting the race, bringing about political empowerment, and organizing and pooling the resources and talents of blacks to face the hardships of economic, racial, and political oppression in the United States.”62 Religious institutions tasked themselves with the uplift of African Americans on the basis of natural black religious identity. Which denomination or tradition could best harness, tame, and refine African American religion to enable racial uplift?

The Future: The Urban Environment, Social Uplift, and Institution-Building

In her 1896 article on New York’s black churches in the magazine Outlook, Lida Rose McCabe wrote that “the past decade has wrought radical changes in the religious life and service of the Afro-American . . . Emotion—the basic motor of the religious life and worship of the negro of bondage—is now yielding on every side to systematic, practical work, in which altruism

59 “St. Benedict the Moor,” New York Globe November 24, 1883. 60 On the Catholic influence on Protestant architecture see Ryan K. Smith, Gothic Arches, Latin Crosses: Anti- Catholicism and American Church Designs in the Nineteenth Century, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006). On aesthetics see John Davis, “Catholic Envy: The Visual Culture of Protestant Desire” in The Visual Culture of American Religions, edited by David Morgan and Sally Promey (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001): 105-128. 61 Evans, Burden of Black Religion, 102. 62 Evans, Burden of Black Religion, 146.

31 has no small part.” St. Benedict’s received a brief mention by McCabe, who simply noted that a “comparatively small number commune at St. Benedict.”63 Nonetheless, McCabe saw St. Benedict’s as participating in a broader shift occurring in black communities. The dialogue produced by St. Benedict’s situated itself in this niche. The Catholic Church could provide the sort of systematic and social-oriented ordering that interested many concerned commentators of black Americans. In short, the Catholic Church’s appeal was based on a civilizing discourse. In many ways the Catholic Church could not fit the model of the black church as it was being conceived of in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1880s American Catholicism had only one self-described black priest, Augustus Tolton. The Catholic Church was a global institution that included numerous races, ethnicities, and nationalities. In contrast, the black church was typically marked as exclusively black and Protestant, if not specifically anchored in black Methodist and Baptist traditions. Despite the fact that few would consider the Catholic Church as a legitimate part of the black church and the fact that the Irish priests would not utilize that type of terminology, the advocates for black Catholicism were engaged in a dialogue in which all of the participants took the assumptions undergirding the “black church” for granted. They believed that black Americans needed a religious institution that unified the black population, provided social ordering and protection within a racist nation, and could uplift the race. The mission believed that the Church’s ability to stabilize populations and to enact uplift were the key features of the Catholic mission to blacks. Their confidence was rooted in certain conceptions of the urban environment and modeled on how ethnic parishes of Euro-American Catholics (especially the Irish) responded to life in the city. The previous sections of this chapter have explored the web of dialogue as it operated through newspapers, books, and poems. However, the physical manifestation of St. Benedict’s within a unique urban space also contributed to the contours of dialogue. Locating St. Benedict’s spatially allows us to contextualize it within a different type of public than the print sources that we have already examined. The church was originally located in Greenwich Village at the intersection of Bleecker and Downing. To try and keep up with a migrating black population, the priests moved north to the Tenderloin district at West Fifty-Third Street in 1896.64 Both locations

63 Lida Rose McCabe, “Colored Church Work in New York,” Outlook August 22, 1896. 64 Sacks, Before Harlem, 72-106.

32 were in the middle of what Omar McRoberts has termed the black religious district in his study of the multiplicity of churches in Boston’s Four Corners district. Developing in the late nineteenth century, black religious districts have been especially intensive spaces in which there is a fluid religious marketplace dependent on voluntarism. People decide with whom to affiliate. Organizations compete for people and money through processes of self-legitimation. McRoberts writes that churches are defined by their “uniqueness,” which “distinguishes them from another in what is basically a demand-driven religious market.”65 The nascent black religious districts of New York functioned similarly. Going into the twentieth century the variety of institutions continued to multiply. Black masonic lodges, non- denominational institutions, black Islamic and Judaic organizations, and other fraternal and maternal groups shared space with the established churches. Even the African Methodist churches, although unified against St. Benedict’s, competed over members and legitimacy. Churches opened and closed depending on their capacity for making an appeal to a segment of the population. Burke and Burtsell, who were in charge of opening St. Benedict’s, were well aware of this reality. After much deliberation over the location of their new mission, they purchased the Bleecker Street Universalist Church, which had been in operation since 1853 but had recently lost more than two-thirds of its members. An odd building for a Catholic Church in the late nineteenth century, the structure of 210 Bleecker Street had wide neoclassical columns. Burtsell oversaw the plans to alter the church, painting it gold, adding an organ, installing the altar, and adorning the front of it with a statue of Saint Benedict.66 It was, it seems, a smart purchase. City guides like the 1893 King’s Handbook directed travelers to visit the “impressive classic building . . . in one of the ancient and crowded quarters of the city.”67 Burke had been able to get a site in the center of Greenwich Village, then known as Little Africa or, as some of the Irish policemen derogatively referred to it as, Coontown. Greenwich Village was peppered with other churches. The Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church on Sullivan and the Zion Methodist Church on Bleecker were within two blocks.

65 Omar M. McRoberts, Streets of Glory: Church and Community in a Black Urban Neighborhood, Morality and Society Series (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003), 11-12. 66 “After Fifty Years: Closing Services in the Bleecker Street Universalist Church,” New York Herald, October 29, 1883. 67 Moses King, Kings Handbook of New York City, 2nd edition (Boston: Moses King, 1893), 396.

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St. Benedict’s second location at West 53rd Street, where it still exists today as a Spanish mission, was an even more bustling, although impoverished, district. In 1911 anthropologist Mary White Ovington wrote of it as a “fashionable street” where the “din of the elevated [elevated train] drowns alike the doctor’s voice and his patient’s, the client’s, and the preacher’s.”68 St. Benedict’s shared the area with Mt. Olivet Baptist Church, St. Mark’s Methodist Episcopal Church, the Society of Sons of New York, the YMCA, the YWCA, the Colored Freemasons, and the Negro Elks. As Judith Weisenfeld has asserted, these black institutions were some of the most stable in the city.69 Much like Harlem would later, Greenwich Village and the Tenderloin district served as important black public spaces that became centers of community action and discussion. Such spaces were never settled, but were instead defined by their mutability. New York’s black religious district was a type of marketplace. However, African Americans operating within the religious marketplace viewed the intrusion of the Catholic Church through St. Benedict’s as a threat to the marketplace. St. Benedict’s neighboring institutions had strong reactions when it opened in 1883. Black Methodist and Baptist ministers had concocted a unified response to St. Benedict’s a week before its opening. They gave sermons on opening day condemning the new mission. According to one report, 3000 attended Protestant services that day. This was double that of St. Benedict’s opening procession. The ministers preached from the pulpit that St. Benedict’s was “a snare of the most subtle nature” and a signal of the “invasion that Rome and her allies are about to make among the colored people.”70 A sermon from William Benjamin Derrick, who was a vocal pastor of the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, proclaimed that the Catholic Church “recognized human chattledom,” and that it would “degrade, so far as in its power, and not elevate the negro.” He admonished his congregation to “adhere to the faith of your fathers and your mothers and teach your children to do so.”71 Black Catholicism was unnatural, contrary to the black experience in America, and unlikely to aid in the social uplift of blacks. The language

68 Mary White Ovington, Half a Man; the Status of the Negro in New York (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1911), 38-39. 69 Judith Weisenfeld, African American Women and Christian Activism: New York’s Black YWCA, 1905-1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 65. 70 “St. Benedict the Moor’s Dedication of the First Catholic Church for Colored People,” New York Globe, November 24, 1883. 71 “Warning Their Flocks: Colored Protestants Exhorted to Stand by Their Faith,” The New York Times, November 19, 1883.

34 of ensnaring, enslavement, and degradation reflected the lasting power of rhetoric used by Protestant abolitionists in the antebellum period.72 For many evangelicals, the Catholic Church and the institution of slavery were similar in their capacity to prevent the flourishing of true religion. Protestants emphasized the role individual conscience. The Catholic Church and slavery, through their manipulative practices, had violated the rights of the individual to choose freely their religion. Although the threat of slavery was over, the Catholic Church still threatened the United States’ status as God’s chosen nation in the second half of the nineteenth century. In response to St. Benedict’s, many journalists and ministers advocated for a unified response from black Protestant churches. None more so than the New York Globe, which was often critical of St. Benedict’s and wrote explicitly from a Protestant perspective. One article in the Globe likened the Protestant-Catholic missions over blacks to a battle: “The war was waged all along the line. But our ministers must understand that talk is not only the weapon with which to combat opposition. The Catholics tlak [sic] very little—they work all the time.”73 Embedded in this statement was a testament to the Catholic Church’s interest in social action. In part due to the Protestant assumptions that permeated state institutions, the Catholic hierarchy had invested its resources into their own institutions that would provide education, healthcare, job support, and political protection to its parishioners.74 The parish was central for the development of these institutions. Most Euro-American Catholics had an ethnic parish to attend. Before 1883 black Catholics did not. Often competitors for employment, urban space, and social capital, the tense relationship between the Irish, who dominated the church hierarchy, and black Americans had resulted in unequal access to Catholic spiritual, educational, and social resources as Harriet Thompson’s letter to Pope Pius IX, which was mentioned earlier, suggests. That parishes had an ethnic identity—Irish, Italian, German, Polish, and so on—exacerbated the situation for black Americans due to tensions with those groups. Catholic parishes were central to the development of ethnic enclaves, helping stabilize and define neighborhoods. Irish, Italian, Polish, and German Catholics situated Catholic institutions at the center of their communities. Such institutions provided religious services,

72 McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 43-68. 73 “St. Benedict the Moor,” New York Globe¸ December 1, 1883. 74 Paul C. Gutjahr, An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777-1880 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 113-142.

35 healthcare, education, gymnasiums, and lyceums. John McGreevy’s Parish Boundaries serves as the best work in uncovering the importance of Catholic spaces in the urban north. As McGreevy writes, “the assumption,” among priests of the urban north, “was that the Catholic faith could not flourish independent of a Catholic milieu; the schools, parish societies, and religious organizations were seen as pieces of a larger cultural project.”75 Because of these institutions and their emplacement within certain ethnic enclaves, “the parish was immovable.”76 For McGreevy, this layering of religious, ethnic, and social identities helps explain the resistance that Euro- American Catholic groups had toward black Americans and other ethnicities in their neighborhoods. The liberal priests that served St. Benedict’s believed that Protestantism had fractured American society. They believed that this was especially evident in African American neighborhoods. Resting on the assumption of the negative impact of religious fracturing, black Catholic advocates believed that ethnic parishes and the development of ethnic Catholic institutions within these parishes could provide a stable environment for black Catholics, helping prevent converts to Protestantism and helping the mission expand. As Burtsell wrote in a letter to the editor of the New York Globe, the mission was necessary to prevent apostasy among black Catholics who “did not go to [the Catholic Church’s] other churches, some having gone to other colored churches [that is, Protestant churches] for social reasons.” The new parish would provide a home for blacks. Burtsell elaborated: whether “Catholic or non-Catholic,” the mission would provide a sanctuary “where one of their on [sic] race is honored as a Saint of God.”77 The priests drew upon the Euro-American model in which parishes fed off of and into ethnic identities. Creating a black parish based on the Euro-American model was an ironic development considering the tensions between the Irish and blacks. Nonetheless, this ambiguity defined the relations between the Irish and other ethnic groups. As James Barrett has written, the Irish provided the model exemplar for other oppressed groups in the city. The Irish were the first and most successful in producing a “defensive urban culture.” Barrett writes that “at its best, this mind-set led Irish Americans to support integration and reform for other oppressed migrant

75 See John McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996), 24. See also James R. Barrett, The Irish Way: Becoming American in the Multiethnic City (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 57-104. 76 McGreevy, Parish Boundaries, 19. 77 Richard L. Burtsell, “Consistency of the Catholic Church,” New York Globe, December 22, 1883.

36 peoples; at its very worse it became an excuse for racial and ethnic intolerance such as the Irish themselves had faced.”78 The priests often situated St. Benedict’s within a broader progress narrative of the Church. In 1884 Father McSweeney, giving a sermon for St. Benedict’s first anniversary, proclaimed that “a year ago the existence of this church was a mere thought in the brains of one of our two pious men; now it has a congregation out-numbering the wildest hopes . . . What was our Church fifty years ago in this particular section? Only a few unfortunate immigrants, the cast off of other countries. Out of their toil and sweat churches and schools and colleges have sprung up all over the land.”79 McSweeney folded St. Benedict’s into the broader narrative of Catholics in the United States and, indeed, expected the mission to follow the same trajectory. The number of black Catholics in the city might be few, but through the devotion of the laity and the guidance of the priests, the black Catholic parish could develop through these types of institutions. Of course, the model of a people unified and protected by their religious organization was not solely the product of the Irish, but had parallels in the developing discourse of the black church. Of course, many assumed that Protestant institutions would be the ones inhibiting or advancing the race. This remained the case until the growth of Islamic, Judaic, and Ethiopic religions in the 1900s provided new alternatives. Whereas most of the Euro-Americans in parishes were Catholic on arrival, the black Catholic population was marginal. The variety of religious organizations in black religious districts posed a problem. Many in the Catholic hierarchy believed that secret societies, Protestant institutions, and inter- or non-denominational resources threatened the Church and were fundamentally anti-Catholic. As noted, these institutions shared street space with St. Benedict’s. Even Burke, although not without some sympathy, sought to restrict access to non-Catholic institutions.80 In part because of the Catholic Church’s reputation as a reliable, systematic bureaucracy, Burtsell believed the mission, which was to be located in Greenwich Village, then referred to as Little Africa, would be a success. Even Protestants contemplated the ability of the Catholic Church to impact the social status of marginalized groups. Protestant commentators feared the

78 James R. Barrett, The Irish Way: Becoming American in the Multiethnic City (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 12. 79 “Like Unto a Mustard Seed,” New York Herald, November 24, 1884. 80 Davis, History of Black Catholics, 201-202.

37 bureaucratic systematicity of the Catholic Church and the viability of a successful mission. Reflecting on the fractured state of black Protestantism, black intellectual James Weldon Johnson wrote that “one church might be made into an agency that would improve their industrial, social, and civic status, as well as their spiritual state,” adding shortly thereafter that the “Catholic Church serves as a grand example of the conservation of power, an example we might well imitate.”81 The Catholic Church had a renewed interest in social issues in the late nineteenth century. This received papal sanction with the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, which emphasized the injustices suffered by the working class. The solution was not the abolition of private property, but the strengthening of hierarchical authority and the expansion of socially-oriented institutions like orphanages, hospitals, and vocational schools.82 Despite past conflicts between the Irish and blacks and despite the urban north’s black Protestant tradition, we can perhaps see the logic of the black Catholic advocates who hoped and indeed expected mass conversion to Catholicism. Catholic institutions could provide shelter within a hostile urban environment as it had done for, in various degrees, the Irish, Italians, Germans, and the Polish.83 Protestant institutions, as evident in the black religious district, had little capacity to unify. They could only fracture. In order to become an institutional center for black New Yorkers in the same way as Euro-American parishes, St. Benedict’s, more than anything, needed a school. The fight for quality education was an imperative for black Americans following the Civil War. New York outlawed segregation in its public schools in 1900, but the law was often ignored. Even in the integrated schools black children faced discrimination from teachers and pupils.84 The Catholic Church was also critical of public schools. For much of the second half of the nineteenth century the Church was engaged in a battle over schooling with the state. Catholics objected to the use of the King James Bible and overtly anti-Catholic messages taught in schools. Protestants denied that such a curriculum was sectarian. The problem proved intractable and spurred the growth of Catholic parochial schools. Harriet Thompson’s letter to

81 James Weldon Johnson, Negro Americans, What Now? (New York: Viking Press, 1935), 24-25. 82 McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 127-165. 83 McGreevy, Parish Boundaries, 29-54. 84 See Carleton Mabee, Black Education in New York State: From Colonial to Modern Times (Syracuse, N.Y: Syracuse University Press, 1979).

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Pope Pius IX signaled the difficult situation blacks were placed in without a Catholic school to attend. She wrote that the when public school teachers realized they had Catholic students they would tell them that “Blessed Eucharist is nothing but a wafer” and that the “roman pontiff is Anti-Christ.” They can do this because “the Protestants well know that the Catholics do not like the black race with them neither in the churches nor schools.” The Church was leaving “colored children a prey to the wolf.”85 Supporters of black Catholicism were well aware of this dilemma. The official address of the first Black Catholic Congress (1889) proclaimed that “the education of a people being the great and fundamental means of elevating it to the higher planes to which all Christian civilization tends, we pledge ourselves to aid in establishing, wherever we are to be found, Catholic schools . . . in them and through them alone can we expect to reach the large masses of Colored children now growing up in this country without a semblance of Christian education.”86 The Black Catholic Congresses of the 1880s and 1890s served as central platform for lay black Catholics and members of the hierarchy to express their definitions of black Catholicism. As Sister Katherine Drexel, a wealthy benefactor who had an influential role in the national program to evangelize black Americans and who funded schools for later black Catholic parishes, wrote to Burke: “I saw the youngsters who year by year, as they grow up, should be gathered into a Catholic School, since the parents of the children of the day nursery, touched by the tender care of the Colored Sisters, will even if non Catholics, no doubt, wish their children to attend a Catholic school.”87 The reputation of Catholic schools could perhaps convince Protestant parents to enroll their children. This could lead to the conversion of the students, who would be taught Catholic theology along with other curricula.88 Schools could even lead to the conversion of parents. As we will explore in Chapter Three, St. Benedict’s was unable to start a school until 1920 due to its constant debt. The hierarchy created St. Benedict’s in an environment that had proliferating routes of action for how to improve the social and economic status of black Americans. These concerns fed into the multiplicity of institutions developing in the black religious district. Working within

85 Harriet Thompson to Pope Pius IX, October 29, 1853, in “Stamped with the Image of God,” 31. 86 Three Catholic Afro-American Congresses, 69. 87 Katherine Drexel to John Burke, unknown date; St. Mark the Evangelist; AANY. 88 Author Ellen Tarry, who would attend the black Catholic parish of St. Mark’s in Harlem in the 1920s, converted to Catholicism under these very circumstances. Ellen Tarry, The Third Door: The Autobiography of an American Negro Woman (Westport: Negro Universities Press, 1955), 29-57.

39 this fractious environment, priests like Burke believed that Catholic institutions could provide unity and coordinated action, as it had for Irish Americans. Of course, this was predicated on the ability to gain converts in the first place, which depended, many believed, on Catholic schooling. With a school in place, supporters believed that black Americans and the Catholic Church could forge a future together within a hostile city.

Conclusion

As has become clear, this web of dialogue over the nature and function of black religion was contentious. What is interesting, however, is that Irish priests, black Catholic advocates, and black Protestants shared assumptions about what made a religio-racial identity legitimate: (1) historical narratives that contributed to a collective identity through time, (2) the ability to appeal to a naturalized black religiosity, and (3) the capability of an institution to unify and produce social uplift. This was clearly not a sign of an ecumenicism between Protestants and Catholics. It was a sign of their common ground—often implicit—that made the missionizing dialogue sensible to all involved. A general framework for what constituted a legitimate black religion gave Protestants, Catholics, and the emerging slew of new black religions an epistemological ground on which they could make their claims to legitimacy. Such claims affirmed the interwoven nature of religious and racial identity. I agree with Henry Goldschmidt that it might be better to view religious and racial identities as not merely intersecting, but as “co-constituted categories, wholly dependent on each other for their social existence and symbolic meanings.”89 By staying attentive to how ostensibly distinct discourses were implicated in one another we can uncover the submerged assumptions that inform acts of identification. Racial and religious claims permeated the contests over the past, present, and future of blacks to such an extent that “religion” and “race” are inseparable analytical categories. It was according to these standards that supporters of black Catholic missions were optimistic in the potential of their missions to prevent apostasy and to gain new converts. Supporters of St. Benedict’s built their missionary appeal on the understanding that Catholicism was not only a (or, ultimately, the) legitimate religion, but that it

89 Henry Goldschmidt, “Introduction: Race, Nation, and Religion,” in Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas, 7.

40 could be legitimately black as well. The institutional history of St. Benedict’s and the outcome of this appeal is the subject of the next chapter.

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CHAPTER THREE

“THE SCHEME WAS EXPERIMENTAL!”

Writing privately in his diary, Richard L. Burtsell reflected on his role in funding and organizing the Church of St. Benedict the Moor. “The scheme,” he wrote, “was experimental!” If the experiment failed, “the public proof would stand that a fair attempt had been made to care for the negroes.”90 The Catholic Church, he believed, would not be at fault if the mission did not succeed. Burtsell’s rare cautionary note would prove to be a more reliable projection of St. Benedict’s legacy than the optimistic hopes that the Accademia usually propagated. His attempt to protect the Catholic Church from blame concealed the history of racism within the American Catholic Church that contributed to its difficulties. However, I also disagree with the dominant historiography of black Catholicism that puts the burden solely on the hierarchy. The success or failure of the mission was dependent on a variety of factors both inside and outside of the church. The mission expanded and faded away between 1883 and 1920. At the same time, black Catholicism lost its novelty and enigmatic status in the city. The church became a normalized feature of the black New York religious landscape. The Catholic mission to African Americans in New York City at the turn of the twentieth century was largely unsuccessful. St. Benedict’s suffered from constant debt. Few African Americans expressed a positive interest in the mission. The number of converts was far less than the hyperbolic rhetoric suggested. I believe that there are four reasons for this. First, African American suspicions of Catholicism were engrained in black New York. Second, St. Benedict’s failed to secure revenue. Third, the Catholic argument embedded in the mission was premised on the desire for a black monocultural environment. Black New York, however, was developing into polycultural bazaar of religious identities and organizations that were rarely rigidly exclusive. Finally, American racialization created insurmountable differences between Euro-Americans and African. The racial gap persisted and even increased even as many non-black Catholics supported, attended, and interacted with black Catholics. In the previous chapter I examined the Catholic appeal to black New Yorkers and the dialogue that this appeal prompted. Discursive excavation is useful in reconstructing, however

90 Burtsell, Diary, 5 September 1883; Newspapers and Journals, 19; Reports, ST-D-5; AANY.

42 partially, the worldview of historical subjects. We now have an understanding of the webs of meaning that motivated a variety of religious and racial communities creating and reacting to St. Benedict’s. However, discourse analysis is at its best when supplemented with more traditional methods of history that examine institutions, people, money, and objects.91 This chapter traces the institutional history of St. Benedict’s from its opening in 1883 to 1920. I have structured the chapter according to three interrelated themes: demographics, finances, and services. Each section situates the church within the context of the urban environment. As the dialogue over the meaning of black Catholicism played out through New York’s newspapers and the streets, the institutional history played out through local economies and communities. I conclude the chapter with an account of how New York’s black intellectuals utilized St. Benedict’s in ways that the Catholic priests did not originally portend. Despite the failure of the hierarchy’s expectations, St. Benedict’s came to occupy a unique and useful space among a circle of black intellectuals. Although priests premised the mission’s potential on the unifying and organizing power of Catholicism, the black religious and intellectual landscape absorbed St. Benedict’s as one of the many black institutions in early twentieth-century New York City. The patent optimism of the early mission contrasts sharply with the latent pessimism (or at least caution) that St. Benedict’s example inspired. St. Benedict’s still exists as a church today, but the mission mentality that built and sustained it in its first few decades had faded away by the 1920s.

Demographics

Despite the intentions of the Catholic hierarchy, St. Benedict’s was unable to replicate the Euro-American parish model. One reason for this failure lies in the shifting urban demographics of New York. We can appreciate such shifts with an eye to the work of Omar McRoberts, who has provided a useful model for understanding religious organizations and their cities. In Streets of Glory, McRoberts examines the dynamics of Boston’s black religious district the Four Corners. He notes the way that “localities present opportunities for and place constraints on the flowering of religious markets.” The common dictum of the housing market might apply equally

91 Chapter Three is informed by Judith Weisenfeld’s methodology, which I explored in Chapter One. See Weisenfeld, Hollywood Be thy Name.

43 to the churches: location, location, location. Within these localities churches—like corporations—compete for scarce resources: money, adherents, information, and legitimacy.92 Early twentieth-century black institutions sought to embed themselves within black neighborhoods. The crowding of churches resulted in the black urban religious marketplace. African Americans created and supported a variety of new organizations that flourished in this environment. Holiness-Pentecostal, Apostolic, Judaic, Islamic, non-specific Protestant, and Catholic institutions operated alongside black Baptist, Methodist, Episcopalian, and Masonic institutions that dated back to the first half of the nineteenth century. Black religious marketplaces would take the shape of the mid-twentieth-century store-front churches famously studied by Arthur Huff Fauset.93 Within these districts, institutions competed for scarce resources by emphasizing what made them exceptional and different from neighboring religious institutions. However, this was a difficult endeavor near the turn of the twentieth century. Black neighborhoods were constantly moving. Black communities were far less stable than Euro-American communities. New York City was rigidly divided into racial and ethnic neighborhoods. Trespassing into other neighborhoods invited problems from either the locals or hostile police forces. This was certainly true for African Americans, whom many Americans regarded as one of the least desirable races. They were even lower on the racial hierarchy than the lowest Euro-American immigrants. These assumptions limited black mobility and opportunity. Landlords often preferred Euro-American immigrants to African Americans. As Italian, Irish, Germans, and Polish neighborhoods expanded landlords often raised rent on African Americans with the hope of attracting preferable tenants. In response African American communities were constantly forced to move. Often they moved northward in hopes of finding cheaper rent and more stable residences. This trend continued until the 1920s when Harlem emerged as the stable center of black culture in New York.94 When St. Benedict’s opened in 1883, Greenwich Village was a well-known African American hotspot. As I mentioned in Chapter Two, the priests located the church in Greenwich Village at Bleecker and Downing, but were forced to move when migration northward drew

92 McRoberts, Streets of Glory, 9-12. 93 Arthur Huff Fauset, Black Gods of the Metropolis; Negro Religious Cults of the Urban North (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1944). 94 Sacks, Before Harlem, 72-106.

44 parishioners away from the church. The priests decided to move St. Benedict’s to the Tenderloin district at West 53rd Street in 1896. The move was by no means an upgrade. The new church was far smaller than the neo-classical behemoth that had inspired the priests and had attracted the New York public. The first church drew a crowd of eight hundred. The second church resembled a mere chapel. The architectural shift between these two buildings illustrates the diminished confidence and capacity of the mission. The number of attendees at St. Benedict’s seems to have remained constant. However, non-black Catholics, somewhat surprisingly, began to attend the church shortly after its opening. An 1884 article quoted Burtsell that there was a growing congregation of four hundred.95 An 1891 article gave the number at between three and four hundred, which included both white and black congregants.96 In 1911 anthropologist Mary White Ovington described at least half of the parishioners as white.97 Although the number of parishioners seems to have remained constant, the Church of St. Benedict’s seems to have lost many of its African American parishioners. Presumably many of these white parishioners were Italian since Italians populated nearby neighborhoods. Unlike many Irish and Italian churches, St. Benedict’s lacked the appeal and clout to become the anchor to a cohesive and immovable black Catholic community. Obviously the fact that most Irish and Italian communities were already Catholic contributed to the sustainability of their parish-centric neighborhoods. New York City was defined by its racial, ethnic, and religious variety and cosmopolitanism. However, racial difference increasingly served as the primary means of differentiation in city. This was especially true as many Euro-American groups—which previously had been unfavorably racialized as black, nearly black or simply not white—began to qualify for the privileges of whiteness around the turn of the twentieth century.98 The negative stigma attached to African Americans limited their ability to choose where they live, what jobs they could work, and their ability to improve their socio-economic position. The shifting nature of black neighborhoods made it difficult for debt-ridden religious institutions to keep pace with the moving population.

95 “St. Benedict the Moor,” New York Globe, March 1, 1884. 96 “Observing their Eighth Anniversary,” New York Tribune, November 23, 1891. 97 Ovington, Half a Man, 116-117. 98 For the classic argument about the whitening of immigrants see Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995). For a succinct account of the privileges of whiteness and their historical concealment see Steve Garner, Whiteness: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2007).

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Finances

Due to their forced migrations through the city, African Americans were a shifting target for Catholics. However, the flow of people was not the only problem. Money was in short supply. Churches required revenue in order to provide for the salaries of priests, pay property costs, and maintain or expand their services. This was especially important at the turn of the twentieth century when churches more than ever served multiple functions.99 They provided education, employment assistance, relief for the poor, orphanages, and community events. Creating the aural and material environment expected for a Catholic church was also expensive. The mission’s financial books are filled with transactions for altar supplies, organ repairs, pews, candles, and choir salaries. The story of St. Benedict’s must include the story of its ledger books. By examining the church’s finances we can see how the mission was forced to seek funds from non-black Catholics in order to survive. Despite the best efforts of the priests and laity, the black Catholic church could not become self-sustaining. Although the historical record has largely erased the cultural and social contributions of the laypeople of St. Benedict’s, it is clear that they played a role in supporting St. Benedict’s financially. Often times this took the form of private donations. John Edward West Thompson, who was serving as consul to Haiti, provided support, as did Harriet Thompson, who had lamented the condition of black Catholics to Pope Pius IX in 1853. A group of black women formed an association to instruct young girls how to sew. They sold their wares and donated the profits to the church. A number of well-to-do non-black Catholics also contributed to the church. This was especially true in the 1880s when the newspapers were constantly covering St. Benedict’s. Prominent Irish lawyers, businessmen, and philanthropists supported the mission.100 The Spaniard José Francisco de Navarro, who made his fortune from building railroads and modern apartment complexes, donated thousands. Mass collections also provided a small amount of revenue. However, the largely working-class congregation could not contribute much on a day-to-day basis.

99 See Milton C. Sernett, Bound for the Promised Land: African American Religion and the Great Migration (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 122-153. 100 Church of St. Benedict the Moor finances from January 1st 1884 to January 1st 1885, Archdiocese Parish Collection; St. Benedict’s Finances; AANY. This year provided the most detailed data on the church’s finances.

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The women of St. Benedict’s hosted fairs to collect money from parishioners, fellow Catholic churches, and locals interested in fun and games. Women such as one Louise Darry staffed tables to provide refreshments and sell goods. Raffles gave participants a chance to win prizes such as “diamond rings, gold headed canes, a cask of ale, a silver mounted pistol and the like.” That a Captain William H. Clinchy of the city police force seems to have won the pistol suggests the multiethnic environment of these fairs (and perhaps smart maneuvering on the part of organizers).101 Occasionally the fairs would pit white women, whom the journalists referred to as the “wealthy” Catholics, against the black women of St. Benedict’s in a “kindly rivalry” with, as one newspaper reported, the hope of “luring the coin of the realm into their coffers in exchange for these articles with which tables at bazaars are laden.”102 The fairs produced a curious environment that attested to the unique position of St. Benedict’s at the intersection of a well-to-do Irish-dominated Catholic population and a predominantly working-class African- American population. Tensions between these groups often damaged the Catholic mission to African Americans. However, the fairs also sought to render these tensions into a fundraising opportunity for St. Benedict’s. The fairs were a crucial source of money. In 1884 the fair brought in $10,637, which accounted for nearly one-third of St. Benedict’s revenue for the year. For comparison, the internal collection for the same year totaled $970.103 Over the next three decades the amount generated by the fairs declined in general. However, they still remained an important source of funding: $6823 (1894), $4167 (1898), $4557 (1900), $6740 (1905), $7843 (1907), $5753 (1909), $5493 (1911), $4674 (1913), $5475 (1915). The church put on other community events to fundraise. Parishioners—and especially the children of the church—put on concerts, plays, and other entertainment spectacles to bring in funding. For special events the church hosted a number of local entertainers, most of whom were Catholic but not African American. In 1886 the mission put on a concert that featured a variety of songs reflecting Irish heritage and songs popular in minstrel shows. A variety of musical guests played songs like Thomas Moore’s “Erin, the Tear and the Smile” and Stephen Foster’s

101 “The Catholic Colored Church Fair,” New York Herald, February 27, 1884. 102 “Great Rivalry at This Faire. White and Colored Catholics Will Compete with Each Other at the Booths and Tables,” New York Herald, February 12, 1894. 103 “Church of St. Benedict the Moor finances from January 1st 1884 to January 1st 1885,” Archdiocese Parish Collection; St. Benedict’s Finances; AANY.

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“Way Down on the Suwanee.” The latter was a curious choice. The song’s inclusion attests to the attempt of these productions to capitalize on the popularity of blackface performances, and to herald the old plantation for the sake of nostalgia. The performance packed Steinway Hall, which was the center of New York culture and could seat 2,000 patrons. When Burke came on stage to thank the volunteer musicians, he was, as one report noted “received with prolonged and enthusiastic applause, which evinced the strong hold he has on the affections of his people.”104 Although the intention behind St. Benedict’s was to provide a black Catholic space, the financial needs of the mission necessitated an appeal to non-black audiences. Burke also worked tirelessly to fund St. Benedict’s Home, to which we will return later in this chapter. Often he printed holiday cards depicting children. These were circulated among Catholics to solicit money for the orphanage. Burke placed the children front and center. The front of one card from 1886 featured a drawing of two joyous black girls embracing each other and holding toy dolls. They smile to the observer. The campaign helped direct funds toward the orphanage. In 1886, for example, St. Benedict’s Home raised $793 from private donations. The church raised $516.105 Following the move to West 53rd Street in 1896, New York’s newspapers began to question the viability of St. Benedict’s. The church’s debt was public knowledge. Burke responded to the accusations with his own article in 1895: “Our mission work is not to be abandoned. The receipts for the past year were $2,811 less than the expenses, but it is not a question of Does it pay? But, Is it necessary to have St. Benedict’s?”106 On the other hand, Burke knew that the fate of the parish was at least in part tied to revenue streams. No money, no church. “I am to hustle,” Burke wrote to Archbishop Michael Corrigan.107 Hustle he did, using most of his time and correspondence to ask neighboring congregations for collections, soliciting wealthy Catholics, working to convince banks to extend loans, and taking out new mortgages. Banks, skeptical of the viability of St. Benedict’s, demanded the assurance of the Archbishop of New York that the hierarchy supported the mission and would honor any accrued debts. Frustrated, Burke asked the banks “if they wanted the earth” as well. The bankers responded that

104 “St. Benedict the Moor Concert, 1-5-1886,” New York Freeman, January 5, 1886. 105 “Financial Statement From January 1, 1886 to January 1, 1887,” Archdiocese Parish Collection; St. Benedict’s Finances; AANY. 106 “St. Benedict’s Mission Work,” New York Sun, April 7, 1895. 107 John E. Burke to Michael Corrigan, January, 11 1890, St. Benedict’s Home; AANY.

48 archbishops “had given them personal bonds in singular cases.”108 Burke worked desperately to convince banks of the viability of the church as he struggled with persistent debt and took out loans to try and maintain services like his black orphanage.109 Despite his efforts, the banks questioned the financial viability of a black Catholic church. It was only with an archbishop’s guarantee that the banks would loan to St. Benedict’s. The banks viewed the mission in and of itself as a bad investment with little potential for growth. Despite the attempt to diversify the routes of revenue, St. Benedict’s suffered from persistent debt. In 1890 St. Benedict’s had $49,000 in mortgage debt, an amount that would shoot up to $69,000 two years later and fluctuated, albeit generally downwards, in subsequent decades. The debt hung over the church and its supporters. It limited St. Benedict’s institutional development and prompted many commentators—especially those who were already antagonistic to the propagation of black Catholicism—to declare the mission a failure. St. Benedict’s parishioners were unable to provide enough capital to keep the mission afloat. The church had to seek revenues from a variety of different sources in order to survive. The fairs, concerts, and bank loans brought in the most money in the 1880s, when New York City Catholics presented the mission as an exciting and novel project. Black Catholic support for the mission never died. However, the fairs and concerts brought in less money as St. Benedict’s became a normalized feature of the black and Catholic religious communities. As we will see, the transformation of St. Benedict’s from an institution that would put on performances that included “Way Down on the Suwanee” to a hotspot of black radicalism probably made various non-black Catholics hesitant to donate to the church. As the spectacular optimism of the early church faded from public interest, non-black Catholic support for St. Benedict’s faded as well.

Services

Now that we have explored the demographics and finances of the church we can begin to trace its institutional growth through the services that it provided. As I have mentioned, churches at the turn of the twentieth century increasingly emphasized the multiple services they provided. Religious organizations provided education, job assistance, poor relief, entertainment, and spaces

108 John E. Burke to Michael Corrigan, April 7, 1891, St. Benedict’s Home; AANY. 109 “Financial Statement for Church of St. Benedict’s Home, January 1st 1891 to January 1st 1892,” Archdiocese Parish Collection; St. Benedict’s Finances; AANY.

49 for intellectual and communal discourse. Social services were especially important in urban black communities. New York’s black community suffered from poverty. African Americans living in the area around St. Benedict’s were overwhelmingly either working class or unemployed. Furthermore, many of the wealthy white beneficent institutions in the city refused to cater to African Americans, hoping to focus instead on incoming Euro-Americans. Chapter Two has already emphasized the importance of education for the mission to African Americans. The church could gain a high amount of converts by creating Catholic schools for black children. The children and, hopefully, their parents would convert to Catholicism. Burke constantly sought the funds to build a school. Time and time again, he failed. The inability of St. Benedict’s to establish a school within the first four decades limited the success of the mission. Although the rhetoric examined in Chapter Two emphasized the hope that the Catholic Church could provide order and uplift within a hostile urban environment, the institutional history of St. Benedict’s suggested otherwise. It was a common belief among Americans that the urban environment had deleterious effects on blacks. Cities were conceived of as especially dangerous spaces. Rather than focusing on structural problems, many commentators (especially missionaries) emphasized the savage nature that the urban environment could unleash. Left to their own devices, blacks would be unable to uplift themselves and would descend into their naturally corrupted nature. For example, Irish-American police commissioner William McAdoo published Guarding a Great City in 1906. The book decried New York’s African Americans as prone to vices such as gambling, race-mixing, prostitution, theft, and murder. Even the “many deserving” African Americans “find it impossible to live in neighborhoods where this element gets a footing.”110 From McAdoo’s perspective, African American neighborhoods created nothing but environments of inescapable vice that had to be quarantined, if they could not be eliminated altogether. The urban environment gave African Americans a degree of self- governance that they were not equipped to handle. 111 Burke was never as sensational as McAdoo. However, the language he used to describe the black orphanage, which he created in 1891, shared the fears over African Americans in the city. St. Benedict’s Home was first located on MacDougal Street, near St. Benedict’s. The

110 William McAdoo, Guarding a Great City (New York : Harper & Bros., 1906), 99. 111 Sacks, Before Harlem, 72-106.

50 orphanage was created “to rescue,” as the certificate of incorporation stated, “Colored Children . . . from the evil influences which surround them, by providing a house or houses in said City of New York where such colored children may be gathered and sheltered and nurtured and receive such instruction as shall counteract their tendencies to vice and irreligion and shall fit them to earn their own living in the various branches of industry.”112 The authors—the priests and the trustees—did not elaborate on the source of these “tendencies,” but the discourse fit well within the popular understanding that African Americans were ill-equipped to deal with life in the urban environment. Burke eventually came to believe that the orphanage’s location at the heart of the bustling city was hurting the church’s ability to rehabilitate black children. A report in the New York Herald on the orphanage claimed that it had become clear to Burke that “no institution of this character could be located advantageously in the heart of the city.”113 Burke raised money to provide a new location. After much deliberation he moved the orphanage to Rye, which was then a rural location on the coast of mainland New York, just north of Long Island. Reports provided an idyllic description of the new orphanage: “Few strangers visiting Rye fail to notice a good sized modern building of attractive architecture, separated by a stretch of lawn from an ancient farm house . . . the ear of the passerby cannot escape being assailed with the cheery laughter of the scores of happy colored children, boys and girls, playing on the greensward in front of the buildings”114 The language used to describe the new orphanage suggested a creeping doubt about the viability of Catholic reform within urban black communities. Catholic reform of African Americans might require their extrication from the urban environment. St. Benedict’s Home signaled a point of departure from the optimistic rhetoric in the 1880s that heralded Catholicism’s ability to organize and uplift within the city. Although St. Benedict’s failed to create a school to educate the children of its parishioners, St. Benedict’s Home did provide education to the orphans. One article reported that there was “a movement among the parishioners . . . to show the progress made by the Roman Catholic Church in its education, religious and secular, of the negro.”115 The orphans were to

112 “Certificate of the Incorporation of St. Benedict’s Home for Destitute Colored Children,” April 25, 1890; St. Benedict’s Home; AANY. 113 “Great Rivalry at this Fair,” New York Herald, December 2, 1894. 114 “Great Rivalry at this Fair,” New York Herald, December 2, 1894. 115 “Catholics Grow Enthusiastic,” Daily Inter Ocean, July 17, 1892.

51 present the goods that they created at the Home at an exhibit demonstrating the advances made in New York’s Catholic education since Archbishop John Hughes’ call to strengthen parochial schooling in the face of public schools’ entrenched Protestantism. City records present a different picture. State inspectors chastised the orphanage school for failing to provide quality education. Specifically, the report stated that St. Benedict’s Home needed to teach practical skills to help the children eventually find employment.116 Popular turn-of-the-century pedagogy sought to “Americanize” Euro-American immigrants and African Americans by emphasizing physical labor over intellectual exercises. At least in the eyes of the state, the orphanage failed to provide either one of these.117 Burke was unable to keep the orphanage afloat with local funds. In 1897 he was forced to transfer St. Benedict’s Home care and finances to the Mission of the Immaculate Virgin, which had less experience in working specifically with African American communities. A group of Franciscan sisters would take over the work previously done by Dominican sisters. Burke claimed that the Dominicans were intimately familiar with “the colored people in the city.” Despite Burke’s pleas the Franciscan sisters replaced the Dominican sisters and St. Benedict’s Home became a project separate from St. Benedict’s mission to African Americans.118 St. Benedict’s Home closed in 1940 when it became clear that it would be cost-efficient to send the children to other Catholic orphanages. Catholicism did not subsume the black community. The attempt to replicate the Euro- American parish among black Americans was a flawed strategy. The Catholic Church had misread the desires of African Americans. Scholars have recently explored the rise of institutional particularism and polyculturalism in many black locales and black religions. We can use Jacob Dorman’s analysis of black Israelite religions to unpack the black urban environment that resisted Catholicism’s exclusivist tendencies. Although he provides a specific example, Dorman is reflecting on African diaspora religions broadly. He argues against the idea that African American religions were rooted in one tradition, region, or essential set of beliefs. Even the term syncretism fails to capture African American religion-building. Instead, he argues that

116 State Board of Charities to Patrick J. Hayes, February 9, 1923; APC; St. Benedict’s Home; AANY. 117 See Melissa F. Weiner, Power, Protest, and the Public Schools: Jewish and African American Struggles in New York City (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010). 118 John E. Burke to Archbishop Michael Corrigan 29 November 1896 in Taking Root, 73; St. Benedict’s Home; AANY. Unfortunately, I have been unable to locate more sources on the Dominican sisters and their role at St. Benedict’s Home.

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African American religion should be described as “polycultural” assemblages that cannot be located in one region or tradition. Certainly, no culture should be described as pure. All cultures are the “reblending of the already blended,” as Dorman writes.119 However, he argues that African American religions have celebrated this blending rather than avoided it. African Americans pieced together beliefs and practices from freemasonry, Pentecostalism, Anglo- Israelism, conjuring practices, Islam, and the more traditional Protestant denominations to form new religions. Although many of these religious organizations made exclusivist claims, they also viewed themselves as serving a broader black community rather than a single religious tradition. Dorman’s study of the Black Israelites reveals the “rich substratum of working-class cultural creativity that deserves to be read into the history of the ‘New Negro’ Renaissance that has become most associated with Harlem.”120 Urban black communities in the early twentieth century built religious and secular organizations to care for migrants. As argued by Milton Sernett, The emphasis on social progress of African Americans prompted many organizations to emphasize co-operation over conflict, at least in terms of social aid.121 Black New York was a pastiche affair and the Catholic hierarchy’s distrust of popular resources such as the YMCA, Protestant churches, and freemasonry did not help the mission to African Americans who participated in many of these organizations. As I have noted, Burke, although sympathetic to black Catholic interest in other institutions, sought to restrict access to non-Catholic organizations.122 And even were it not for the variety of institutions in the black community, St. Benedict’s did not have the capital to replicate the resources of Irish parishes. Although the Catholic hierarchy may have found St. Benedict’s to be a failure, the African American community did not view it in such dire terms. St. Benedict’s transitioned from a threat to a pillar of the black community. There is evidence of St. Benedict’s taking on a new role within the black community as early as the 1890s. In December of 1889 the black churches of New York City sent delegates to St. Benedict’s to organize an association to protect the interests of black workers in the state. St. Benedict’s again provided the locale for the Young Men’s Industrial League of New York’s first meeting a year later. The association sought to organize the industrial interests of African Americans by fighting for fair wages and helping

119 Dorman, Chosen People, 186. 120 Dorman, Chosen People, 185. 121 Sernett, Bound for the Promised Land, 122-153. 122 Davis, The History of Black Catholics, 201.

53 unemployed African Americans find industrial jobs. Robert Wood, who was a parishioner of the church and who served as the head of the Committee on Grievances for the Catholic Congresses, served as president of this organization. Most of the leaders within it, however, do not seem to have been Catholic. Indeed, newspapers described the organization as “non-political and unsectarian.”123 The Young Men’s Industrial League used St. Benedict’s as a base of operations, but the organization sought to represent the black community writ large. At least to some extent St. Benedict’s overcame the Protestant antagonism it suffered from in the early 1880s. African Americans had adopted St. Benedict’s as a space for expressing the concerns of the black community. Other organizations that centered themselves at St. Benedict’s attest to the emerging co- operative efforts in the black community. None more so than the church’s lyceum. Lyceums became a popular forum of intellectual dialogue in the nineteenth century. They were put on by and for the community and featured lectures, speeches, and discussions over a diverse range of topics—science, philosophy, history, and politics. In The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States, Angela Ray argues that lyceums provided spaces through which publics identified themselves as publics. Lyceums were a self-conscious “means of simultaneously making and expressing culture.”124 Although the same could be made about any institutions, lyceums were unique in that they understood themselves to be engaging in and representing the concerns of their specific communities. Free African Americans began organizing lyceums in the antebellum period. Attended primarily by educated black men, black lyceums were centers of debate over abolitionism and black America. Their importance to northern black communities lasted well beyond emancipation.125 The role of lyceums in abolitionist movements granted them a degree of importance within northern black communities that helped them flourish well into the twentieth century. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find records the give us a detailed look at the actual contents of St. Benedict’s lyceum. However, it is clear that a number of influential thinkers attended St. Benedict’s lyceum. Hubert Harrison was one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the lyceum. Born in St. Croix, which was then part of the Danish West Indies, Harrison

123 “Colored Men Want Equal Pay,” New York Tribune, February 26, 1890. 124 Angela G. Ray, The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2005), 2. 125 Ray, The Lyceum and Public Culture, 30-32.

54 immigrated to the US in 1900. Although largely forgotten by historians, Harrison has re-emerged as an important early influence on the Harlem Renaissance thanks to Jeffrey B. Perry’s biography.126 Above all, as Perry argues, he was an intellectual radical who shaped the emerging Harlem culture, especially the concept of the “New Negro.” Harrison was also a well-known freethinker and an avowed agnostic. He prided himself on his constant maneuvering between socialism, various religious associations, black pride, internationalism, and, occasionally, feminism. He rejected adherence to the Catholic Church. However, he also admired certain aspects of Catholicism. Musing on the possibility of him ever converting to Christianity, he concluded that he would become Catholic due to the “beauty and solemnity of its ritual,” its “subjection of Reason to faith,” and the quality of Catholic education. Specifically Harrison wanted to learn Latin. On this point he reflected, “Suppose I sell myself for knowledge, suppress a few negative convictions? Whose is the very small loss? Whose is the very great gain?”127 Harrison admired some of Catholicism’s particulars even as he harbored a suspicion towards the Catholic Church. The lyceum served as a space utilized more for religiously varied black voices rather than as a platform that solely emphasized the efficacy and efficiency of the Catholic Church. In fact Harrison hyperbolically referred to St. Benedict’s as the “germ” of black racial consciousness, as noted in Perry’s biography.128 He also credited the church for serving as one of the early spaces of cooperation between West Indians and American-born blacks. St. Benedict’s was not the only lyceum in New York City. Other churches and secular organizations also hosted lyceums. Nonetheless, Harrison located St. Benedict’s at the center of his development and the emergence of black racial consciousness and radicalism. Other black intellectuals such as Pan-African artifact collector Arthur Schomburg and the journalist John E. Bruce, neither of them Catholic, attended the lyceum and praised the church. Samuel Duncan, who played an important role in creating the Universal Negro Improvement Association with Marcus Garvey, was also involved. In 1908 Schomburg wrote to Bruce that “Harrison is clean cut in public life and can cut and nip things right and left. He has a mind of his

126 Jeffrey B. Perry, Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). 127 Hubert Harrison to Miss Frances Reynolds Keyser, May 20, 1908, HHHDI, A Hubert Harrison Reader, edited by Jeffrey B. Perry (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 39. 128 Perry, Hubert Harrison, 72.

55 own – he is a product of St. Benedict’s Church. So is [Samuel] Duncan; but both are determined in seeing things in their own way.”129 Thomas O’Keefe, who took over as St. Benedict’s priest after Burke’s departure in 1907, was crucial in the formation of Harrison’s oratorical skills, helping him overcome a severe lisp.130 A circle of Harlem intellectuals who were hostile towards denominational adherence, if not Christianity itself, utilized and praised the mission that a number of Irish priests had created in order to Catholicize black New York. Unfortunately, neither the archdiocese archives nor the available writings of the Harlem radicals provide a detailed look into the activity at St. Benedict’s lyceum. Nonetheless, the fact that they claim to be products of St. Benedict’s suggests the important role it had within New York’s black culture.

129 Arthur Schomburg to John E. Bruce, January 17, 1917; John Edward Bruce Papers; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division; Group B Autograph Letters, box 2, no. 282; New York Public Library. 130 Perry, Hubert Harrison, 72.

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CONCLUSION

RACE, RELIGION, AND AUTHORITY

There is no inherent contradiction between Catholicism and African Americans. If we take the broad view, most descendants of African who live in the Americas have been Catholic, not Protestant. However, many African American communities in the United States have harbored a suspicion towards Catholicism. Obviously this is in large part due to the fact that most African Americans in the United States have been Protestant. Protestant organizations were more active and successful in converting African Americans in the decades following emancipation. The ability of evangelicals in the nineteenth century to use abolitionism as a way of legitimating black Protestantism made black communities unlikely to convert to Catholicism. Nonetheless, an increasingly powerful, wealthy, and confident Catholic Church sought to catch up to its Protestant opponents. When Catholics sought to missionize African Americans, they premised their appeals on what they believed caused the poverty and suffering of African Americans: religious fracturing. St. Benedict’s was supposed be successful because Catholicism provided order in an otherwise chaotic world. I mean this in the institutional sense more than the theological sense. Like Euro- American parishes, St. Benedict’s hoped to provide an institutional focal point for the racial community. If the mission could simply start a school to attract African Americans in the first place then the community would come to realize the organizing and unifying power of Catholicism. The Catholic Church would emerge as the stabilizing center of a black neighborhood. This was the Catholic solution to the black religious marketplace, which many Catholics viewed as a de-stabilizing force in and of itself. The proliferation of black religious institutions indicated the dangers of the religious marketplace. Although interested in appealing to black discourses in order to legitimate black Catholicism, the priests misread the emerging culture of black New York. By the 1920s Harlem dominated black New York and, according to many Americans, black America. African Americans had finally created a stable neighborhood that they could permanently call their own. Harlem emerged as not only the center of black life in New York, but as the center of black life in the nation. Despite the desires of many Catholics, Harlem stabilized not through the institution of the Catholic Church, but through the very forces that St.

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Benedict’s was supposed to overcome. The inhabitants of Harlem celebrated the polyculturalism and shifting nature of black religious institutions. They celebrated an aversion to the rigid denominational adherence that had defined American religion in the nineteenth century. Figures like Hubert Harrison, Arturo Schomburg, and John Bruce shaped and exemplified the emerging black celebration of polyculturalism. Harlem’s residents were not caught in a dichotomous debate over Protestantism and Catholicism. The culture that they created resisted submission to any single religious institution. Although their rhetoric could be exclusive, new black religious movements co-operated even as they competed. African Americans participated in multiple religious associations. Harrison, for example, attended St. Benedict’s, masonic lodges, episcopal churches, Methodist churches, black Israelite organizations, and many other organizations. He saw no contradiction in the multiplicity of his associations. The lyceum circuit, which was crucial in the development of black communities, incorporated religious institutions into a shared network. The main goal of this network was to provide cross-denominational and cross-class dialogues by and for the black community. The failure of St. Benedict’s to start a school and the success of St. Benedict’s lyceum provides us a glimpse into the struggle over authority that has been at the core of interactions between African Americans and the Catholic Church. The New York City hierarchy’s investment into the experiment of missionizing African Americans was a disappointment. Although St. Benedict’s survived as a church, Catholics ceased to view St. Benedict’s as a mission. Newspapers stopped visiting the Church, which journalists must have viewed as unexceptional and no longer interesting. The Catholic Church did not incorporate the black community. The black community, I conclude, incorporated the Catholic Church. The religious conflict between black Protestants and the supporters of St. Benedict’s was palatable in the 1880s. By the 1900s dichotomous conflict had turned into the religious and secular co-operation and proliferation of organizations that defined the Harlem Renaissance. The Church of St. Benedict and future black Catholic churches operated within and, ironically, contributed to this environment. Because of this fact New York’s Irish priests toned down the optimistic and exclusionary rhetoric explored in Chapter Two. They could no longer present the Catholic mission to African Americans in such stark terms.

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The polycultural environment also frustrated the ambitions of many black Protestant organizations. New black religious movements threatened the black Protestant tradition just as the Catholic Church had threatened it when Irish priests began experimenting with black missions. Although they lamented the new environment, they were better suited than Catholic churches to navigate the polycultural world. They were less defensive about Protestant congregants participating in a variety of black religions. They also had precedent for this type of environment due to the multiplication of black Baptist and Methodist associations in the nineteenth century.131 The New York Catholic Church, on the other hand, had typically defined Catholicism by contrasting itself with an American religious landscape damaged by its fractured nature and the never-ending multiplication of sects. Indeed, this contrast was supposed to be at the core of its appeal to black America. Burke and Burtsell had underestimated the power of American racialization when they thought they could apply a Euro-American parish model to African Americans in New York City. The appeal of the mission was based on black desire but with the intention of erasing the color line and, ultimately, downplaying racial difference. St. Benedict’s would be a space for African Americans, but they would have to accept their position as one among equals, even when very few of those they would share Catholicism with would view them as equals. The ultimate goal for the Catholic Church was not the defense of African Americans, but, at least in theory, the erasure of human difference within the Catholic Church. This did not fit easily into African American culture as it was developing in the early twentieth century. African Americans, long shunned and marginalized by American institutions, were forced to rely on their own institutions to protect their interests. Many African Americans took a suspicious stance towards organizations that were not products of black communities. Black intellectuals like Harrison and Schomburg emphasized black self-determination. With an overwhelmingly Irish hierarchy, African Americans had a difficult time imagining the Catholic Church as representing black interests. Furthermore, Euro-American groups were beginning to attain the privileges of whiteness. As Steve Garner has argued, “the Irish grasped that they were capable of attaining whiteness but would have to argue their case, and that revolved around distancing themselves from Others, especially black Americans.”132 Whiteness, as a number of

131 Sernett, Bound for the Promised Land, 180-209. 132 Steve Garner, Whiteness: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2007), 129-130.

59 studies have argued, is not a self-evident or natural category, but a shifting identity that marks a group of people as proper subjects who can be incorporated in the body politic. Euro-American Catholic immigrants, who were first rendered as non-white, became white by contrasting themselves with African Americans. Despite the rhetoric of Catholic universalism, the regime of racialism dominated Euro-Americans and African American self-understanding. On the national stage many Catholic missions to African Americans fell apart in the early twentieth century. John Slattery, who was so important in shaping the discourse used by Burke and Burtsell, left the Catholic Church in disgust in 1907. Religious rhetoric, he explained in New York newspapers, never translated to real change. In explaining the failure of the Catholic mission to African Americans, Slattery simply stated that “religion, in fact, counts for nothing in the every-day world.”133 He became a socialist. Augustus Tolton, the first self-described black priest in the United States, gave up his mission work to African Americans in favor of a life of contemplation. The optimism of the Catholic Church in regards to black Catholicism dimmed after the 1910s. John E. Burke went on to direct the Catholic Negro American Mission Board in 1907. Although far more cautious about making hyperbolic claims, Burke continued to believe in the attempt to missionize African Americans. His attitude, however, had changed due to the low yield of St. Benedict’s. In an interview Burke argued that African American “salvation lies in work. The negro must be brought to realize the necessity for regular labor. Eighty-five per cent of the negroes in the south are in rural communities. It is far better for them that they should remain where they are than that they should come to the cities, for that means the ruin of many of them.”134 Burke still hoped that the Catholic Church could have a role in missionizing and uplifting African Americans. However, he had lost hope that missions could be successful in the urban environment. The South, perhaps, provided a greater opportunity. Urban black communities’ multi-institutional culture made widespread success of Catholic missions unlikely. The belief that Catholicism could be the solution to African American religious fracturing reappeared a number of times in the twentieth century. Kelly Miller, who was a sociologist at Howard University, made similar claims in the 1920s. The “Negro in America,” he wrote, “represents an inherently weak group which needs to attach itself to some great body which has

133 John Slattery, “From an Ex-Roman Catholic Priest,” The Independent, February 7, 1907. 134 “For Uplifting the Negro,” The Evening Telegram, October 2, 1908.

60 the power and disposition to protect and defend him.”135 Lay black Catholic Thomas Wyatt Turner, who was a colleague of Miller, founded the Federated Colored Catholics in 1925 with this end in mind. The FCC, however, came into conflict with Catholics in the hierarchy. John LaFarge, who was one of the leading Catholic experts on race from the 1920s to the 1950s, sought to diminish lay control over institutions like the FCC. The hierarchy made it explicit that racial problems could be solved only through submission to the one true and universal Catholic Church, which liquidated racial barriers.136 I conclude this thesis with the observation that the hierarchy’s paternalism—they are fathers, after all—remained a point of conflict between the American Catholic Church and African Americans well into the twentieth century. Liberal Catholics’ optimism that a top-down mission to African Americans could save the race continued to rub up against the self-defining and protective mentality that permeated African American communities. The ultimate source of authority—whether it be the Catholic hierarchy or the black community—has remained a point of contention between black Catholics and the predominantly white Catholic hierarchy. This is evident in a number of recent power struggles and the emergence of an explicit black Catholic theology.137 The Catholic Church’s relationship with African Americans has often been defined by Catholic ambivalence towards race. On the one hand, the Church has been interested in missionizing African Americans and has often sought to do so by appealing to African American desire as they interpret it. On the other hand, the Church has made it clear that the end-goals of the hierarchy must have authority over the end-goals of black communities. Alongside the high expectations of St. Benedict’s and the dedication required to keep it running, Richard L. Burtsell could simply note that if the mission failed then the public would at least know that a “fair

135 “Kelly Miller Says,” Baltimore Afro-American, November 27, 1925, quoted in Evans, Burden of Black Religion, 238. 136 See David W. Southern, John Lafarge and the Limits of Catholic Interracialism, 1911-1963 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996). 137 Michael Pfleger, a white priest, has won acclaim among the black community in the South Side of Chicago for his willingness to clash against the authority of the Catholic Church when the hierarchy encroaches on the interests of his black parish. See Yasmin Rammohan, “Parishioners Protest Pfleger Suspension,” Chicago Tonight, April 28, 2011, http://blogs.wttw.com/moreonthestory/2011/04/28/parishioners-protest-pfleger-suspension/. Similarly, theologians like M. Shawn Copeland have sought to place black vernacular culture (in this case, the blues) at the center of Catholic theology. See Copeland, “Theology at the Crossroads: A Meditation on the Blues” in Uncommon Faithfulness, 97-107.

61 attempt” had been made.138 Liberal Catholics sought to collapse racial difference even as they so clearly propagated racial difference through their paternalistic understanding undergirding their formation of black Catholicism. The question was not always what black Catholicism is, but who got to define it. St. Benedict’s provides us with a curious example of how a group of liberal Irish priests sought to legitimize Catholicism among African Americans in the 1880s. They did so with the support of a number black Catholics and through the funds provided by non-black Catholics. The hostility of black Protestants towards the Catholic Church necessitated a campaign on the part of the Church to legitimate itself according to the existing assumptions of black religiosity. The mission failed according to the standards set by the priests. In the process, however, St. Benedict’s contributed to the normalization (but not domination) of black Catholicism in New York City and provided an important platform for black intellectuals who would shape the Harlem Renaissance. What many scholars have missed is that the intention of the Church in the United States does not always match the effect of the Church. Beliefs, practices, and capital leak out of institutions and defy their original purpose. This is why I assert a skeptical stance towards historiographical corrals. From threatening black Protestant hegemony to serving as a space for freethinking black radicals, the Church of St. Benedict the Moor turned out to be more experimental than its founders imagined.

138 Burtsell, Diary, 5 September 1883; Newspapers and Journals, 19; Reports, ST-D-5; AANY.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Jeffrey Wheatley

Jeffrey Wheatley received his Bachelor’s degree in History from Arizona State University in Fall 2011. His research focuses on the intersections of religion, race, capitalism, and the state in the nineteenth-century United States.

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