Book Review

Black and Catholic in the Jim Crow South
The Stuff That Makes Community
By Danny Duncan Collum
Paulist Press.178 pp. $14.95
ISBN 0809143712

Reviewed by Father John S. Rausch

The civil rights movement of the late 1950s and 1960s readily acknowledges the leadership of black Protestant congregations as the walls of segregation crumbled. Catholic parishes, a meager force in the South at the time, frequently had little chance to play a significant role in the struggle for civil rights. Yet Natchez, Miss., a town with both Spanish and French background, developed a Catholic African-American parish with white pastors (Holy Family Church) that served as the headquarters for the area chapter of the NAACP and a center for black education.

Black and Catholic in the Jim Crow South by Danny Duncan Collum uses interviews from 44 people, mostly black, to chronicle the Catholic influence for justice in one corner of Mississippi. (These interviews were collected by Glenmary Father Tim Murphy working with the Glenmary Research Center.) With only three expository chapters (Introduction, Historic Natchez and A Southern Road to Freedom), Collum relies heavily on the words of those interviewed to recollect the ancestry, recall the school days and reconstruct the struggle for integration.

Black Catholics lived as a double minority in Natchez. As black parishioners, they prayed in a predominately white Church, but as Catholic lay people they lived in an overwhelmingly Protestant African-American community. Still, Holy Family Catholic Church and its St. Francis School (now Holy Family School) propelled people forward in their discovery of self-worth and struggle for human dignity.

The dozen chapters of interviews reflect memoirs that reveal personal stories and opinions. One black woman "ran the town because her information ran the town." "And it was a known fact that they'd get a better education at the Catholic school."

But hard reality beats through: "There were days back then, weeks and months even, that I couldn't go look at the Mississippi River because so many bodies were being found there."

This slim volume reveals information from testimony that popular historians seldom reveal.

Collum uses two pageants to frame his work. At the book's beginning, "The Historic Natchez Pageant 2002," depicts the Mississippi myth circa 1850: the noble southern planter, not as a greedy slaver, but a philosopher-king and patron of the arts. It dodges any reference to the exploitation of slaves. At the book's conclusion, "Southern Road to Freedom" serves up a fervent portion of African-American gospel music with African-American singers bringing white tourists from the audience onto stage for the grand finale. It coalesces into "an offering of redemption and reconciliation." 

Black and Catholic in Jim Crow South allows readers to feel the pathos of blacks who lived through Jim Crow and now finally trumpet their independence and self-worth. One caveat: read carefully the introduction to get the context and history. Refer frequently to the source notes for names and descriptions. But, basically forget about tying everyone together, because ultimately the Holy Spirit allowed Holy Family parish, and thus a portion of the Catholic Church, to participate in the freedom of brothers and sisters in the South.

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