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Religion, Race, and Rights in Catholic Louisiana, 1938-1970

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Religion, Race, and Rights in Catholic Louisiana, 1938-1970 RELIGION, RACE, AND RIGHTS IN CATHOLIC LOUISIANA, 1938-1970 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Notre Dame in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Justin D. Poché, B.A., M.A. _____________________________ R. Scott Appleby, Director Graduate Program in History Notre Dame, Indiana April 2007 © Copyright by Justin D. Poché 2007 All Rights Reserved RELIGION, RACE, AND RIGHTS IN CATHOLIC LOUISIANA, 1938-1970 Abstract by Justin D. Poché Away from the traditionally understood flashpoints and well-known actors within the civil rights struggle, South Louisiana and its most significant social and religious institution offer an essential case for examining the complex interplay of religion and racial consciousness in the twentieth century south. Tracing the religious sources of progressive activism and conservative reaction in the region, I argue that Catholicism, as both an institution and an ideology, decisively shaped how Louisianans, both African American and white, understood and acted upon the mid-century struggle for human rights. From unionization and voter registration efforts among black Catholic communities in the 1940s to the integration of Catholic institutions and the white backlash that followed, the Catholic experience in Louisiana encapsulated a variety of social and political conflicts. Into these confrontations, Louisiana Catholics wove intense religious struggles over the nature of religious authority, spiritual fulfillment, and social liberation. A close study of their experience reveals in important ways both the complexity and the intensity of the larger struggle over the meaning of race in twentieth century America. For Louis A. “Doc” Poché, S.J. ii CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ....................................................................................................... iv CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION............................................................................................. 1 CHAPTER 2: JIM CROW CATHOLICISM ......................................................................... 14 CHAPTER 3: RACE AND RERUM NOVARUM .................................................................. 60 CHAPTER 4: SIN AND SOCIOLOGY............................................................................... 105 CHAPTER 5: THE CATHOLIC CITIZENS' COUNCIL.................................................... 157 CHAPTER 6: FAITHFUL DISCONTENT.......................................................................... 199 CHAPTER 7: EXCOMMUNICATING JIM CROW........................................................... 240 CHAPTER 8: THE POLITICS OF RECONCILIATION.................................................... 295 EPILOGUE........................................................................................................................... 347 BIBLIOGRAPHY................................................................................................................. 350 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my dissertation committee for all of their support throughout this process. My advisors, R. Scott Appleby and John T. McGreevy, offered valuable insight as I researched and wrote this dissertation. The Louisville Institute provided me with a generous Dissertation Year Fellowship in my early stages. I also benefited from a Graduate Teaching Fellowship through the University Writing Program and a Kaneb Center Teaching Fellowship, both at the University of Notre Dame. Special thanks go to the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism for their support. The Amistad Research Center and special collections at Tulane, Loyola University, and Xavier University of Louisiana were all invaluable to my study, as well as the archives of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament and the Josephite Fathers. Tulane University served as my host for the final year of writing, while my generous relatives in New Orleans, Carol and Jackie Poché, came to my aid despite all the hardships of post-Katrina New Orleans. Above all, I would like to thank my parents, John and Iris Poché, for all of their love and support. iv CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION This dissertation examines Catholic encounters with the dramatic social and economic changes taking place in Louisiana between the high point of Jim Crow and the end of the 1960s. Catholicism, as both an institution and an ideology of popular beliefs, rituals, and social values, decisively shaped how Louisianans, both African American and white, understood and acted upon the dramatic social and economic changes taking place around them. In the early 1900s, rising white hostility to African Americans and the legal and economic barriers of Jim Crow prompted official church actions to create a separate Catholic world for blacks in the shadows of a growing white church. In response to white pressures and driven by its own paternalistic concern for its “failed mission” in the years after the Civil War, the institutional church created schools and churches staffed by outside missionaries to serve the “Negro Apostolate” in the Deep South. While such official actions alienated blacks from the mainstream of Catholic life in Louisiana, African Americans nonetheless forged within this separate space a distinctive social and religious community through which they would make sense of the larger social struggle throughout the early twentieth century. These communities also provided significant—if often limited—foundations for black challenges to white dominance in the region. By the 1940s, the increasingly concerted activities of African American Louisianans in both social and religious spheres 1 converged with the efforts of white Catholic social reformers who envisioned the post- war south as an ideal proving ground for Catholic social teaching on labor, industry, and social reconstruction. The incongruities between this Catholic vision of social order and the spiritual and social aspirations of black southerners created an uneasy alliance. Nonetheless, by bringing the church’s historic commitment to organized labor into the world of black sharecroppers and tenant farmers, this alliance also yielded significant moments of class-conscious solidarity. By the 1950s, as many American liberals shifted attention from the earlier New Deal vision of economic injustice to the specific issue of racial segregation, Catholic social reformers hoped to carry the church’s teaching on Christian unity and social order into an effective movement for interracial justice. From the beginning of the decade until 1956, when Archbishop Joseph Francis Rummel declared segregation “morally wrong and sinful,” Catholic interracialists emphasized the moral conversion of southern whites as the key to the southern race problem. In the process, they framed black southern protest within a distinctive Catholic theological worldview that emphasized the teaching authority of the church and its timeless vision of justice. Such a framework both limited and enhanced Catholic commitment to the larger civil rights struggle. In the second half of the 1950s, segregationists effectively undermined the Catholic interracial campaign. As one of the first private movements against school integration after the 1954 Brown v. Board decision, the mobilization of people in the pews constituted the backbone of massive resistance in the region. Reflecting the priorities of segregationist leaders throughout the south who projected an image of respectability and patriotism amid black challenges to the “southern way of life,” 2 Catholic segregationists in Louisiana legitimized their movement by creating a viable theological space within Catholic teaching for segregationist attitudes. By employing the assistance of many priests and demonstrating their devotion to the “One True Church,” they cast the ideas and motives of Catholic interracial leadership, especially those of Archbishop Rummel, as a radical departure from Catholic doctrine. This grassroots movement effectively delayed integration through the end of the decade. Had Catholic schools integrated four years earlier as originally intended, many progressives argued, New Orleans might have offered a symbol of racial justice in the Deep South. But the 1960 New Orleans School Crisis, involving the entry of four black children into two formerly all-white public schools, epitomized the church’s failure to act decisively in the years following Brown. It also dramatically complicated black Catholic self-understanding at mid-century. Throughout the end of the 1950s, as the church delayed integration and whites in both the pews and the state-house forced interracialists underground, black laity who had endured decades of religious and social segregation began to question not only the church’s moral authority and resolve in effecting significant social change, but also their own. Through the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Greensboro Sit-ins, and other protest efforts, African American southerners began mounting more concerted and forceful challenges to Jim Crow. As they did so, black Catholics in Louisiana struggled to define their place within both the Catholic Church and the larger black struggle. Responding to this disillusionment, and to pressures from national Catholic interracial organizations, a group of prominent laity in New Orleans stepped in to promote Catholic school integration. In contrast to the earlier movement, concerned as much with asserting church’s unique 3 theological stake in the civil rights drama, this new
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