View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by eScholarship - University of California UC Santa Cruz UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Catholic Interracialism in New Orleans, 1930-1980: A Historical Survey with Implications for the Post-Katrina Moment Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/45c8r590 Author Banks, Elyse Publication Date 2019 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California University of California Santa Cruz Catholic Interracialism in New Orleans, 1930-1980: A Historical Survey with Implications for the Post-Katrina Moment A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in HISTORY by Elyse Banks September 2019 The Dissertation of Elyse Banks is approved: ___________________________________ Professor Eric Porter, Chair ___________________________________ Professor Alice Yang ___________________________________ Professor David Brundage _________________________________ Quentin Williams Acting Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by Elyse Banks 2019 Table of Contents List of Abbreviations iv Abstract vi Acknowledgements viii Introduction 1 Chapter 1: The Federated Colored Catholics and the Development of Catholic Social Justice, 1917-1939 30 Chapter 2: Catholic Interracial Organizing and the Desegregation of New Orleans Parochial Schools, 1950-1965 116 Chapter 3: The Associated Catholic Charities and the Resettlement of Vietnamese Refugees in New Orleans East 190 Chapter 4: Hurricane Katrina and the Catholic Church: Toward Interracial Cooperation 243 Bibliography 286 iii Abbreviations ACC Associated Catholic Charities ASWPL Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching AFL-CIO American Federation of Labor & Congress of Industrial Organizations BNOB Bring New Orleans Back Commission CCHR Catholic Council on Human Relations CCIA Catholic Clergy Conference on the Interracial Apostolate CCS Catholic Conference of the South CHR Commission on Human Rights CIC Women’s Committee of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation CIC Catholic Interracial Council CICNY Catholic Interracial Council of New York CORE Congress of Racial Equality CRS Congressional Research Service DEQ Department of Environmental Quality FCC Federated Colored Catholics FEMA Federal Emergency Management Agency HUD Department of Housing and Urban Development IATF Interagency Task Force LIRS Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service MQVC Mary Queen of Vietnam Church NAACP National Association for the Advancement of Colored People iv NBCC National Black Catholic Congress NBCCC National Black Catholic Clergy Caucus NBCSA National Black Catholic Seminarians Association NBLCC National Black Lay Catholic Caucus NBSC National Black Sisters Conference NCCIJ National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice NCCM National Catholic Council of Men NCCW National Catholic Council of Women NCIF National Catholic Interracial Federation NCWC National Catholic Welfare Conference NOBC National Office for Black Catholics SCHW Southern Conference for Human Welfare SCLC Southern Christian Leadership Committee SNCC Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee ULGNO Urban League of Greater New Orleans UNAVASA Union of North American Vietnamese Students Associations UNO University of New Orleans USCC United States Catholic Conference WPA Works Progress Administration YMCA Young Men’s Christian Association YWCA Young Women’s Christian Association v Abstract: Catholic Interracialism in New Orleans, 1930-1980: A Historical Survey with Implications for the Post-Katrina Moment Elyse Banks The actions of the church today, in particular the possibility and limitations of a Catholic interracial program, may be understood as part of a longer historical process of interracial activism in the Catholic church. Explorations of that history in turn provide insight into the complex racial and political order in the city today. In the early 1930s, black Catholic layman Thomas Wyatt Turner called for a national black Catholic organization to represent the voices of black Catholics in the struggle for racial equality. For Turner, blacks needed to be the architects of the movement for racial justice in the Church. Ultimately, the Church’s decision to temper their approach to racial justice resulted in the repression of Turner’s organization, the Federated Colored Catholics, and black self-determination in the Church more generally. By the 1940s, blacks were still attending racially segregated Catholic Churches in New Orleans where the Catholic interracial movement found its strongest supporters. In this period, while some prominent blacks did have a say in the trajectory of the Church’s social action plan, they were still underrepresented at interracial social action meetings. As the Catholic church in New Orleans struggled to implement the Brown v. Board of Education decision (1954) in the 1950s and 60s, black Catholics once again asked that they be the architects of their own liberation, but once again they were underrepresented. In the 1970s when the Associated Catholic Charities resettled thousands of Vietnamese refugees in New Orleans East, the Church disregarded the impact their resettlement efforts would have on an already vi economically and politically bereft city. Blacks argued that the economic assistance the Catholic Church provided the Vietnamese community was not the same assistance they offered the black community. In this period, black Catholics reinvigorated by the Black Power movement began to call for the creation of black Catholic clerical and lay organizations. At this point, blacks were done asking for a seat at the table, now they demanded one. In other words, a complete history of Catholic interracial organizing must necessarily include a discussion of the black Catholic response. Although the Church stumbled to model true racial inclusion in much of the twentieth century, by the twenty-first century, the destruction and suffering left in the wake of Hurricane Katrina allowed the Church to come full circle in its implementation of a Catholic interracial program. Post-Katrina, the Archdiocese of New Orleans, not only provided much needed social services, but it also successfully meditated conflicts between residents and the local and state governments. The Church bridged racial divides through religious worship and verbally committed itself to ensuring that the ‘new’ New Orleans would remain racially and economically diverse. While scholars have glorified specific periods of the Catholic interracial movement arguing that it achieved some change, but ended after integration in the 1960s, my study purports that it has in fact continued well into the twenty-first century. In this post-Katrina moment, the church’s Catholic interracial plan has proven more successful than at any other time in its attempted implementation, in significant part because of black Catholic activism. vii Acknowledgements First and foremost, the completion of my dissertation would not have been possible without the labor and emotional support of my dissertation committee members. Eric Porter, David Brundage and Alice Yang, I would like to thank you for your unwavering assistance over the course of this long process. Thank you for believing in me when I lost faith in the process. Your encouragement has meant more than words can truly express. Other faculty members who aided in my development as a scholar and instructor were Catherine Jones, Lynn Westerkamp, Matthew Lasar and Greg O’Malley. Thank you for showing me what it means to be a well-rounded instructor--one that is there for their students inside and outside of the classroom. I would like to extend a special thanks to my colleagues in the UCSC History Graduate Studies Program--Noel Smyth, Jeffrey Sanceri, Martin Rizzo, Dustin Wright, and Alicia Romero--who spent hours reading my dissertation and providing valuable comments. We helped each other prepare for the QEs, grade papers and we celebrated with one another when we accomplished our academic and life goals. I am extremely grateful that I had the privilege of working with these folks whom I can now call lifelong friends. Last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank UCSC Graduate Program Coordinator, Cindy Morris, for keeping me motivated and helping me get across the finish line. In order to make it to this level, one needs a good amount of institutional support whether it be emotional or financial. I would not have been able to complete my dissertation without the financial support that allowed me to spend months on end viii conducting research in cities outside the Bay area. I would like to thank the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program, the Center for New Racial Studies, and the UCSC Graduate Division for funding my research trips. I would also like to thank the many archivists who helped me gather pages upon pages of material for my study. Special thanks to Michael Courtney for guiding me through the lengthy collections housed at the Archdiocese of New Orleans. Thank you to Deputy Director Christopher Harter for helping me navigate the numerous collections held at the Amistad Research Center. The assistance I received from the library staff at Xavier University proved invaluable in locating materials pertinent to my dissertation. Special thanks to Ms. Ida E. Jones for helping me weed through the Thomas Wyatt Turner Papers stored at the Moorland-Spingarn