Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle by Shannen Dee Williams

Abstract

Reviewed by: Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle by Shannen Dee Williams Margaret Susan Thompson Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle. By Shannen Dee Williams. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. 424 pp. $29.95. Subversive Habits is the first book-length account of Black Catholic sisters in the United States. Based upon extensive research in relevant archives and numerous interviews with Black sisters (and former sisters) themselves, it fills an important gap in Catholic, Black, and women's history. Shannen Dee Williams's book aims at telling at least three interconnected but distinct stories: that of Black women in U.S. religious life, the experiences of and responses to racism that these sisters experienced, and their activism inside and outside the church. As the author puts it in her conclusion, her overarching objective is to demonstrate why "scholars must center the experiences of Black women and girls in the history of U.S. Catholicism, reconsider narratives that foreground white Catholics in struggles for racial, educational, and gender justice, and push back against characterizations of African American Catholics as politically complacent or conservative" (264). As she puts it in her final sentence, "It is my hope that this book, in offering a more honest accounting of the U.S. Catholic experience and the central place of Black sisters within it, can provide another pathway forward" (269). The result is a compelling and generally persuasive read. No one finishing Subversive Habits can be anything other than convinced of the racism that Black women have faced in the more than two centuries of women's religious life in the United States. Whether drawing upon archival sources or on her many oral history interviews, Williams [End Page 75] conveys both the frustrations and the real pain that Black women repeatedly faced—in communities comprised mainly of European Americans and even in African American congregations—as they attempted to live out their vocations. The suffering of those who were rejected as they tried to pursue vowed commitment, as well as those who experienced blatant racism both from clerics and from women religious themselves (including those who presumably were their "sisters"), is undeniable. The author makes a compelling case that Black Catholics, including Black sisters, have often been portrayed as objects rather than subjects, even of their own stories. Among the important and traditionally overlooked subjects she explores are the history of the National Black Sisters Conference, the consequences of desegregation for Black Catholic institutions (including Black sisters' congregations and the schools they conducted), and both the tensions and collaboration between Black clergy and women religious. The most original contributions Williams makes are in her coverage of the period from World War II (to the present), when her focus is simultaneously on women in predominantly Black communities and on those who attempted, with decidedly mixed success, to enter and remain in "white" ones. Here, she draws extensively on 67 interviews, mostly of Black women she interviewed either in person, by email, or over the telephone. Since many of the individuals are reflecting upon experiences—undeniably powerful and often searing—that occurred as much as a half century or more in the past, it would have been helpful had Williams given at least some methodological explanation as to how she dealt with the effect of the passage of time on these memories. [Two scholarly journals would have been helpful in this regard, History and Memory, and the Oral History Review, but both seem absent from the bibliography.] More troubling are instances where the principal sources cited for some generalizations are individual interviews. See, for example, the argument that white women, including sisters, were using the civil rights movement primarily as means of "gaining credibility and fame in order to launch a national campaign for (white) women's rights and ordination." [p. 190; also 249] While this may have been the case for some, the evidence is not sufficient to make a persuasively comprehensive claim. Perhaps a more nuanced argument ultimately would have been more effective. There are a few glitches in the narrative that may be frustrating to some. The name of Cardinal Joseph...