The Emergence of a Black Catholic Community: St. Augustine's in Washington by Morris J. MacGregor

Abstract

The Emergence of a Black Catholic Community. St. Augustine's in Washington. By Morris J. MacGregor. (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press. 1999. Pp. xiii, 543. $39.95 clothbound; $24.95 paperback.) This is how parish history should be written: with an eye to the big picture! In this substantial volume, Morris J. MacGregor, drawing on rich archival sources, newspapers, and oral interviews, gracefully recounts the. story of St.Augustine's Parish, the mother church of black Catholics in the nation's capital and historically one of the most prominent black congregations in the city Expanding on recent scholarship on African American Catholics and the urban encounter between Catholicism and race, MacGregor skillfully contextualizes this particular case study of a black Catholic community in microcosm, consistently tying developments at St. Augustine's to the larger racial currents swirling through the city, nation, and church. In the process, MacGregor paints a wonderful, variegated social portrait of black Catholic Washingtonians from 1864 through the 1980's. The author argues that for fourteen decades the determined pastors, priests, and people of St. Augustine's parish, despite adversity and formidable challenges (including almost constant debt),succeeded in creating and sustaining a vibrant African American Catholic community-one known for its social activism, rich associational life, evangelization, hospitality, devotion to education, and outstanding liturgical music. Limitations of space prevent more than a cursory sampling of this book and its themes. The founding families of St. Augustine's were free people of color prior to the Civil War and traced their Catholicism back to colonial times in rural Maryland. Indeed, middle-class respectability and the social divisions that sometimes existed between aristocrats of colorand lower-class blacks would characterize St. Augustine's throughout much of its history. The desire of black Catholics in Washington to educate their children and to worship free from discrimination led to the construction of St. Martin's chapel and school (the forerunners of St. Augustine's). Organizers scored a financial coup when they persuaded President Lincoln to allow them to hold a fair on the grounds of the White House in 1864 as a fundraiser. The congregation quickly outgrew the small chapel, thanks in part to its extraordinary classical choir, which attracted blacks and whites from throughout the city and whose concerts would more than once rescue the parish financially. In 1876 the congregation moved into an imposing new brick structure on Fifteenth Street, which was placed under the patronage of St. Augustine. The energy and vigor of St. Augustine's during the late nineteenth mid early twentieth century what with its fairs, parochial school, choir, and numerous parish societies fairly leap off MacGregor's crisply written pages. St. Augustine's parishioners and their supportive white pastors hosted and played crucial roles in the Black Catholic Congress movement between 1889 and 1895 at the same time that their co-religionists in New Orleans were also challenging church and state over issues of racial discrimination. …