Racial Justice and the People of God: The Second Vatican Council, the Civil Rights Movement, and American Catholics

Abstract

ICatholic participation in the southern civil rights movement culminated at Selma in March 1965. As was customary in much of the South, Selma's Catholic churches were strictly segregated, with the priests in charge of the African American mission parish ignored by the city's other clergy. (One attempt at integration of the city's white parish by a group of African American Catholic teenagers met with fierce resistance.)' In addition, the bishop of Montgomery, Thomas Toolen, attempted to prevent northern Catholics from responding to the pleas of civil rights activists for assistance, maintaining that outsiders