Desegregating Dixie: The Catholic Church in the South and Desegregation, 1945–1992

Abstract

Mark Newman is the leading authority on southern churches during the civil rights movement. His first book, Getting Right with God (2001), is a prize-winning study of Southern Baptists and race relations between 1945 and 1995. His Divine Agitators (2004) covers the Delta Ministry project of the National Council of Churches. Newman's latest work, Desegregating Dixie, is a study of the Catholic Church in the South during the civil rights movement that combines prodigious research with carefully nuanced insights. Historians of the civil rights movement, American Catholicism, and African American history will use this monograph for decades. Newman convincingly rejects the sociological view that the hierarchical polity of the Catholic Church made it more progressive than southern Protestant churches on the issue of race relations in the South. In theory, Catholic bishops had great authority over priests and communicants, but, in reality, many southern white Catholics shared segregationist views with their Protestant neighbors. Prior to 1945, southern Catholic bishops felt little pressure to make civil rights an issue. Even when race relations became a growing societal concern, southern Catholic bishops did not want to move too quickly ahead of their flocks or incite anti-Catholic sentiment in the overwhelmingly Protestant and conservative South.