Some of My Best Friends Are Black (41 page)

The first of these was the Church of the Sacred Heart. First incorporated in 1819 under the name St. Charles Borromeo, it was the seventeenth Catholic parish established in the state of Louisiana. In 1879, the parish replaced its original, modest building with a new one, one that its congregants hoped to be “worthy of Almighty God.” Plans for the new
church—drawn up by a prominent New Orleans architect and blessed by the pope himself—laid out a stately, whitewashed, wood-frame building in the Greek Revival style. Adorning its roof was an elegant belfry of a type not commonly seen in North American churches. Inside, ornate frescoes, stained glass, and intricate woodwork gave it an atmosphere more like the classical churches of Europe than what you’d expect to see in a small Southern town. The church itself was set at the end of a picturesque alley of oak trees draped in Spanish moss. Today, it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The other parish, Christ the King, was incorporated in 1931, and its main church was built in 1942. Unlike its stately neighbor a mere three hundred yards away, Christ the King was a simple, redbrick box. It did not sit at the end of a grand oak alley, but on a circular drive just off the road. It had no architectural pedigree, nor any slot on any national registers, yet it was historically important in its own right. The black citizens of Grand Coteau had built it with their own hands, laid every brick, cut and sanded every pew. It was the sanctuary they made for themselves in a time that offered them no other. Even their own faith refused to welcome them just up the road.

Blacks were not allowed at Sacred Heart. Wallace Belson was about to get a very harsh reminder of this, because on that quiet Sunday morning in 1964, he went to the wrong church. He walked down the long oak alley, up the front steps, opened the door to the white church, and went inside. Upon seeing a black man enter, two white men left their pews, went over, and confronted him in the vestibule. Then they started beating him. Right there in church. Dropped him to the floor, kicked him in the head, the back, again and again, then threw him out the door and down the steps into the parking lot below.

All of this took place while the other congregants sat in their pews and looked on, saying and doing nothing.

It was Martin Luther King, Jr.’s constant lament that Sunday morning at eleven o’clock was the most segregated hour in the country, but it’s hard to imagine how our divided country could have kept holy the Sabbath any other way. Given the pivotal role Christianity played in sanctioning
and promoting slavery, it seems a wonder that black Americans would subscribe to it at all. But God’s Holy Bible is a funny thing. For a supposedly sacred, infallible text, it reads a lot like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel. Just flip through and pick whichever story line suits your needs. While the slaveholders built their economy on Leviticus, the slaves found hope in Exodus. “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt,” said the Lord. “I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers.… So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey—the land of the Canaanites.…”

Through faith in God, the slaves would be delivered from bondage, through the wilderness, and into the Promised Land. This was a Christianity they could get behind, and one they sorely needed. The native religious traditions of Africa had been deliberately destroyed by Southern slave society; tribes and families were torn apart by white masters in order to sever the common bonds of language and culture and folklore that might help the slaves unite. Fragments of those traditions survived, however, and synthesized with the Christianity of the New World. Protestant hymns met African rhythms and became Negro spirituals, laying the foundation for a style of worship totally distinct from that of the white European church.

In the North and in larger cities, free blacks began forming their own Baptist and Methodist congregations as early as the 1790s. In 1816 in Philadelphia, blacks broke from the main Methodist hierarchy and organized the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, America’s first fully independent black denomination. In the antebellum South, both Catholic and Protestant slaveholders were encouraged to Christianize their slaves. Many did, but feared (quite rightly) that religion would give slaves the means and the motive to rebel. Southern states passed strict laws compelling slaves to meet and worship only under the watchful gaze of white ministers. But the hunger for physical and spiritual freedom would not be so easily contained. Slave religion went underground, becoming “the invisible church.” Away from the plantation house, under cover of darkness, slaves met in secret, learning to read from the Bible,
passing on tales of Moses and the Promised Land and plotting their escape.

When the Civil War finally brought America to a reckoning, the country broke in half. The Protestant Church shattered into a million little pieces. Sect after sect, it fractured along the fault lines of geography and race. The Southern Baptists seceded from the American Baptists. The Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Lutherans all established Confederate franchises as well. After Reconstruction, those Southern offshoots fiercely embraced the turnabout to segregationist theology that laid the foundation for Jim Crow: where God had once ordained slavery because blacks were naturally submissive, he now ordained apartheid because blacks were inherently dangerous.

After the war, the emancipation of 4.6 million slaves presented what one Catholic bishop bluntly described as “a golden opportunity for reaping a harvest of souls.” Northern Protestant missionaries, black and white, flooded south to build churches and schools. But because white ministers had been deployed to constrain blacks before, given the choice, the freedmen instinctively flocked to their own. The invisible church became visible. The AME denomination added fifty thousand new adherents in less than a year. Baptist churches, being independent from any centralized authority, sprouted up anywhere a preacher chose to hang out his shingle. Hundreds of them grew out of the Southern grassroots, eventually organizing under the National Baptist Convention in 1895, which would go on to become the largest black religious institution in the country. A sprawling constellation of other black Protestant denominations would soon emerge as well, in the way that Protestant denominations always do. Despite this golden opportunity for reaping a harvest, however, the number of former slaves who ran for the embrace of the Roman Catholic Church would turn out to be practically zero.

The Catholics might have done better for themselves. They were, after all, one of the first major Christian denominations to categorically reverse their stance on slavery, having done so in 1839. The Church of Rome was also the only major religion that didn’t break along sectional lines during the Civil War. Technically, it couldn’t. It’s one church—the One True
Church, if you believe the marketing brochure. This idea stems from the principle of the Mystical Body of Christ, which holds that the Holy Roman Catholic Church is the physical manifestation of the body of Christ on earth, with Jesus as its head in heaven.
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The dictionary definition of “catholic” is “universal in reach; involving all.”

While the church did look upon blacks with a paternalistic noblesse oblige, it was rare that Catholic priests actually used their pulpits to promulgate a segregationist theology—a segregated Catholicism is a contradiction in terms. Being true to its principles, the Catholic Church should have offered blacks a refuge from Jim Crow at the start. But Catholics had a problem of their own: Protestants. Anti-Catholic prejudice among America’s Protestants was pervasive; in the South, Catholics were routinely vilified and threatened by the Ku Klux Klan. And so as Jim Crow began to take root, Catholic priests and bishops mostly remained silent. To do otherwise would have invited unwelcome attention. Segregation was a political matter, the church decided. But in accommodating the Protestant power structure of the South, the Catholic Church would have to conform to it, mimic it, and ultimately become indistinguishable from it. Where Southern Protestant churches actively evangelized a segregationist doctrine, the Catholic Church tacitly condoned and camouflaged itself in that doctrine, fully knowing that this violated its core beliefs.

In Maryland (a Catholic colony) and in Louisiana (formerly under French and Spanish—i.e., Catholic—rule), the church had built and nurtured a significant black following. But to send priests into the Deep South after the war would have been to send them into hostile, possibly deadly territory. And converting a nation of black Catholics would saddle them with the problem of having to integrate black Catholics and white Catholics into the One True Church. The solution to this was simple: don’t convert any more black Catholics.

As Protestant missionaries raced into the former Confederacy, the papists stayed home. Twice, in 1866 and in 1884, the Vatican ordered
American bishops to come up with a plan to bring the former slaves into the Catholic fold. On both occasions, the bishops convened a national council, talked, and voted to sit on their hands. An invitation was extended to European missionaries to come and work in the South if they wanted to. Some did. But the only major initiative undertaken by the American church was to pass the hat: once a year on the first Sunday of Lent, a collection was to be taken up to support a special commission on Indians and Negroes. That the church would file the Negro in the same drawer as the Indian tells you exactly how much of a priority they were. By the time the Catholics even thought to do something about expanding their black ministry, the Methodists and the Baptists had already run the board. Today, fewer than 2 percent of black Americans are Roman Catholic.

Though the church’s negligence is in large part to blame for this, outside of those areas where blacks were already steeped in the Roman tradition, it’s debatable how much success Catholic missionaries would have had among the freedmen. Since white clergy had been used to suppress black spirituality under slavery, the top-down, white-run, authoritarian orthodoxy of Catholicism held little appeal for many of the newly emancipated. The Do It Yourself ethos of Protestantism, on the other hand, would prove to be an ideal fit for the century to come.

Under Jim Crow, America made it abundantly clear that blacks would be categorically barred from nearly every civic and social institution in the country, from schools to hospitals to the Rotary Club. The black church would step in to fill virtually all of those roles. In many black communities, the church house was also the schoolhouse, the meetinghouse, and the music hall. Social clubs, death and burial societies, fraternal organizations, black-owned banks and insurance companies, historically black colleges—like spokes on a wheel, they all radiated out from Sunday morning at eleven o’clock.

The church would become the single greatest source of black America’s strength, but that would also make it the deepest and most enduring root of its separateness. Though Martin Luther King obviously advocated for the black church, he openly struggled with the paradox it represented,
calling it the “so-called” Negro church because “ideally there can be no Negro or white church.” Their separation was an accident of history, a crime first perpetrated by whites and now perpetuated by vested interests on both sides.

In all the newsreel footage of gospel-singing freedom marches, one sees the black church as the most righteous and upright institution in the cause of integration and civil rights. It was and it wasn’t. There was the ugly side of it, too. As King’s crusade gathered momentum, the president of the National Baptist Convention was one Reverend J. H. Jackson of Chicago’s Olivet Baptist Church—“the Negro Pope,” he was called, for his tenure and his grip on power were that absolute. Jackson always gets left out of the feel-good Black History Month highlight reels, because from the pulpit of the largest, most powerful black religious institution in the country, he denounced the civil rights crusaders as “hoodlums” and “criminals.” They threatened to usurp the system on which his power was predicated.