• As part of our fall programming, which focused on race and racial justice in the church, we were pleased to have author Olga Segura speak on The Birth of A Movement: Black Lives Matter and the Catholic Church. If you missed our conversation with her, you can watch the recorded presentation.  
• This Wednesday, February 3, at 6:30 PM the Office of Black Catholics for the archdiocese and St. Agatha-St. James parish will be hosting Danielle Brown, the Associate Director of the USCCB’s ad hoc Committee Against Racism for a conversation on “Race and Catholicism.” 
• For resources on Black Catholics, please check out the #BlackCatholicSyllabus prepared by ACHS board member, Dr. Tia Pratt. Please also see the ACHS blogpost on Resources for Race and Racism. 
• For a brief history of Black Catholics in the United States, please visit the National Black Catholic Congress webpage on the topic. They also have a list of Black Catholic Saints and Martyrs and U.S. Black Catholic candidates for Sainthood.
• The latest Black Catholic to make headlines is Amanda Gorman, youth poet laureate, inaugural poet for President Joseph Biden and a member of St. Brigid’s parish (a Josephite parish) in Los Angeles. Here’s a Catholic New Service story on her parish.
• You can also check out back issues of American Catholic Studies for wonderful articles on the topic. Online access to the journal is now available to all members via Project Muse. Instructions on gaining access can be found here. 

Photo: St. Peter Claver Parish, Courtesy of the Catholic Historical Research Center of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.

The U.S. bishops have named the reality of personal and systemic racism and they have called on Catholics to undertake the following tasks:

• acknowledge this sin,
• be open to encounter and new relationship,
• resolve to work for justice,
• educate ourselves,
• work in our churches,
• change structures.

You can find these and other resources on the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops “Combatting Racism” website.

Scholars have long explored these issues. Rev. Dr. Cyprian Davis was a seminal scholar in the history of the Black Catholic community in the United States. 

More recently, Dr. Shannen Dee Williams, historian at Villanova University, has written extensively on the church’s history of slavery and segregation.

Dr. Tia Pratt, ACHS board member, sociologist of religion, and president and director of research at TNPratt & Associates, LLC, calls on the Catholic Church to recognize the impact of systemic racism on African-American Catholic identity and to support the black Catholic community.

Dr. Bryan Massingale, Roman Catholic priest and theologian at Fordham University, provides insight into the “soul sickness” that underlies the current and historical reality of racism in the United States.

To get started, please visit the Black Catholic Syllabus created by Dr. Pratt.

We will be posting additional resources on this topic. Please return to our site periodically for more information.

The American Catholic Historical Society has a professional, moral, and spiritual responsibility to participate constructively in the national conversation on this topic. Recognizing the need for a fuller understanding of the historical and contemporary reality, including in our Catholic experience, we will foreground the work of Black scholars and other persons of color who work in this area on our website and through our programming, and continue to promote scholarship on this topic in our journal, American Catholic Studies.

Read some additional resources on the subject of race and racism.