Background (pre-slavery) Biblical and Patristic era (1st–5th century) Catholic
Christianity among
African-descended people has its roots in the earliest
converts to Christianity, including
Mark the Evangelist, the unnamed
Ethiopian eunuch,
Simon of Cyrene, and
Simeon Niger. Several of the early
Church Fathers were also native to Africa, including
Clement of Alexandria,
Origen,
Tertullian,
Athanasius,
Cyril of Alexandria,
Cyprian, and
Augustine. Saints
Perpetua and Felicity and
Saint Maurice (as well as
his military regiment), early martyrs, were also African. The vast majority of these
Patristic-era figures resided in
North Africa, where various Christian communities thrived until the
Muslim conquests of the region. The
Muslim takeover of Southern Spain (
Al-Andalus) forced a significant Catholic community from there into North
Africa, specifically Morocco; these individuals constituted the
Mozarabic tradition. There were multiple early Christian kingdoms in Africa, the most notable of which emerged in
Ethiopia (then
Aksum). Around this same era, however, there were also
three Nubian Christian kingdoms, all of which were conquered and left little trace of their former glory; scholars have since recovered some of their history. Due to the
Chalcedonian Schism in the 5th century, however, most of this
Eastern (African) Christianity became divorced from Catholicism very early on. Immediately prior to the dawn of the
Transatlantic Slave Trade, Catholic Christianity in West Africa—the region that would produce virtually all of the individuals ending up in
America as slaves—was primarily limited to converts borne from
early European missionary contact, especially in the
Kongo region. Roughly a century before Europe made contact with what would become the United States, the
Portuguese entered the Kongo and began to make converts and engage in trade; there was also some limited
slave-trading between the European power and their new African colleagues.
Slavery era (1400s–1867) Kingdom of Kongo (14th–17th century) The Portuguese appetite for African slaves quickly grew beyond the intentions or capacity of the Kongolese people, leading to one Kongo ruler going so far as to write the
Portuguese king for assistance in stemming the tide of citizens being taken captive from his land. Many of these victims would eventually be brought to the Americas, and some scholars have suggested their common cultural heritage and shared faith led them to instigate at least
one major rebellion in the
colonial United States. The Afro-Spanish conquistador
Juan Garrido entered
Puerto Rico in 1509, helping to conquer it for the white Spanish settlers. African Catholics, slave and free, were also among the Spanish settlers who established the
Mission Nombre de Dios in the mid-16th century in what is now
St. Augustine, Florida. Soon after, the newly established
Spanish Florida territory was attracting numerous
fugitive slaves from the
Thirteen Colonies. The Spanish
freed slaves who reached their territory if they converted to Catholicism. Most such freedmen settled at
Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose (Fort Mose), the first settlement of freed slaves in North America. Spain also settled the California region with a number of African and
mulatto Catholics, including at least ten (and up to 26) of the recently re-discovered
Los Pobladores, the 44 founders of Los Angeles in 1781.
France As more European nations became involved in the
transatlantic slave trade, multiple colonial powers would join the Spanish in bringing African slaves to their
colonies in North America. The French involvement would result in various new African Catholic communities, including the most famous, in
Louisiana (specifically
New Orleans). Here, slaves,
affranchi (former slaves) and
free people of color (blacks born free) formed a unique hierarchy within the larger American
caste system, in which free people of color enjoyed the most privilege (and some even
passed for
white) and slaves the least—though more
phenotypically black individuals faced various prejudices whether they were slave or free. Even so,
French Catholicism (and its influence after the French no longer ruled the area) became notable for its degree of interracialism, in which much of Church life showed little to no
racial discrimination.
Britain The same could not be said of the
thirteen American colonies of
British America, where Catholicism was less common and social strictures were more pronounced and harsh. There was
little to no distinction made between free-born blacks (who were rare) and
freedmen, and while Catholic slave owners in
Colonial America were under the same mandate as any Catholics in that they were obligated to convert,
baptize, and meet the spiritual needs of their slaves, they were not under any local government codes to the same effect (
as were the French) and often neglected their duties in this regard. After the
Revolutionary War and the exit of France and Spain from most of North America, Black Catholics in America faced an increasingly unique situation as
African-Americans living in
slavery and after
emancipation,
segregation in the United States.
Antebellum and Civil War era (1776–1867) Pierre Toussaint During this period a number of Black Catholics would make a name for themselves, including
Venerable Pierre Toussaint, a
Haitian-American born into slavery and brought to New York shortly after the founding of the United States. Freed by his owner in 1807, he would go on to become a famous hairdresser, as well as a notable philanthropist alongside his wife
Juliette. He is the first layperson to be buried in the crypt below the main
altar of
Saint Patrick's Cathedral on
Fifth Avenue, normally reserved for
bishops of the
Archdiocese of New York.
First religious orders and parishes The
Oblate Sisters of Providence were founded by Haitian-American
nun Mother Mary Elizabeth Lange and Fr
James Nicholas Joubert in 1828 in
Baltimore, in a time when black women were not allowed to join existing
orders (which were all-white) and were thought to be unworthy of the spiritual task. Mother Lange has since been declared a
Servant of God and could soon be declared a
saint. Dedicated to providing education to otherwise neglected black youths, the order would found the all-girls
St Frances Academy in the same year as their founding, the first and oldest continually-operating Black Catholic
school in the US. The Oblates' 11th member,
Anne Marie Becraft, was quite probably the illicit granddaughter of
Charles Carroll, the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence. She started
Georgetown Seminary, a school for black girls, in 1820 at age 15 (twelve years before joining the order). The
Sisters of the Holy Family, founded in New Orleans in 1837 by
Mother Henriette Delille, was similar in origin and purpose to the Oblates, though founded by and made up of
Creole free women of color (i.e.,
mixed-race women who were never enslaved). They too dedicated themselves to education and have operated
St. Mary's Academy in New Orleans since its founding in 1867. They also founded the first and oldest Catholic nursing home in the United States,
Lafon Nursing Facility, in 1841. That same year and in the same city,
St Augustine's Catholic Church, the nation's oldest Black Catholic church, was founded by free blacks in the nation's oldest black neighborhood (
Treme). In 1843, Haitian-American Catholics in Baltimore established the
Society of the Holy Family, a 200-member
devotional group dedicated to
Bible study,
prayer, and especially singing. It was the first Black Catholic lay group in the US. The group would disband after two years when the
archdiocese refused to let them use their large meeting hall. In 1845, one of the founding members of the Oblate sisters,
Theresa Maxis Duchemin, helped found a predominantly-white order of sisters in Michigan, the
IHM congregation. She had been the first US-born Black Catholic religious sister when she helped found the Oblates. Notably, due to racism her name and history was scrubbed from the IHM sisters' records for 160 years, until the early 1990s.
Father Claude Maistre In 1857, French Catholic
priest Claude Paschal Maistre obtained
faculties from Archbishop of New Orleans
Antoine Blanc to pastor the city's newly created interracial
Francophone parish,
St Rose of Lima. There he ministered to a French-speaking congregation, encouraging them to form
mutual aid societies (not unlike the one in Baltimore), including
La Société des Soeurs de la Providence. After the breakout of the
Civil War a few years later and the subsequent
occupation of New Orleans, Maistre and his new bishop
Jean-Marie Odin clashed over the race issue, as Odin supported the
Confederacy and Maistre the
Union. The pastor promoted increasingly radical positions (including
abolitionism), fueled by the much-publicized
progressivism of French Catholic clergy in his homeland,
President Lincoln, and local Afro-Creole activists.
Historic St. Francis Xavier (Baltimore) In 1863, the
Jesuits helped a black congregation (then meeting in the basement of their
St. Ignatius Church) purchase a building, which would then become known as
St. Francis Xavier Church—the "first Catholic church in the United States for the use of an all-colored congregation". (Other Catholic churches also lay claim to being the first Black parish in America, including the interracial but mostly Black congregations of
St. Augustine Catholic Church in New Orleans and
another by the same name founded in 1829 in
Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana.)
First seminarians and priests A Black Catholic,
William Augustine Williams, would enter
seminary in 1853, albeit in
Rome due to the ongoing prohibition of black seminarians and priests in the United States. Near the end of his studies (and after a series of discouraging indications and comments from his superiors), he dropped out of seminary in 1862, claiming that he longer felt he had a priestly
vocation. At least three Black Catholics (
the Healy brothers)
were ordained priests prior to the Emancipation Proclamation, though all three passed for white throughout their lives. Their race was known only to select mentors of theirs in the Church. One of them,
James, would become in 1854 the first known African-American Catholic priest and the first such bishop in 1875. Another,
Patrick, would in 1864 become the first black American to join a clerical religious order and the first black American
Jesuit, in 1865 the first black American to earn a PhD, and in 1874 the first black
president of a white or
Catholic university in the US (
Georgetown University). Other than these three, there are not known to have been any other Black Catholic priests in America between the first African Catholic contact in 1509 (in Puerto Rico) and the ordination of the first openly
-Black Catholic priest in 1886.
Post-Emancipation (late 19th century) Louisiana After the Emancipation Proclamation, African-American Catholics became a single class of free black people, though the degree to which that freedom could be actualized varied. In places such as
Louisiana, old habits of separation between blacks born free and those born into slavery remained, which functioned partially on the basis of
colorism but also on grounds of class,
privilege, wealth, and
social status. When parishes in places like New Orleans began to transition from the French tradition of interracialism to the American habit of strict
racial segregation, Creoles (who tended to descend from free people of color) often resisted the move so as not to lose their elevated status as the more privileged
milieu of African-Americans. Black Catholics continued to center primarily in what would become the
Washington D.C. Metropolitan Area. One of these communities, in Norfolk, Virginia, founded
St Joseph's Black Catholic Parish in 1889—later becoming known as the "Black basilica". That same year,
Mother Mathilda Beasley, the first African-American nun to serve in
Georgia, started a short-lived order of black nuns in
Savannah. She would also go on to start one of the first
orphanages in the US for African-American girls. Other areas also counted Black Catholics, including
Missouri, which—also in 1889—produced the nation's first openly-Black Catholic priest,
Augustus Tolton. Born a slave in
Ralls County, he, his siblings and his mother found freedom in
Illinois; he would later, with the help of supportive American bishops and
Vatican officials, attend seminary and be ordained in Europe (not unlike the Healy brothers). He went on to minister in Illinois, was declared Venerable in 2019, and could be declared a saint soon. Another Black Catholic from this era with an open cause for
canonization, Servant of God
Julia Greeley, was also born in Ralls County as a slave, before being taken to
Denver in 1861. She converted to Catholicism in 1880, became a street evangelist and
Secular Franciscan, and ministered to the
poor for the rest of her life (always at night, to avoid embarrassing white people she served).
Organizing . Front and center is Fr
Augustus Tolton, the nation's first openly-Black Catholic priest. Black Catholics would soon begin to organize at the national level as well, first as the
Colored Catholic Congress in 1889 under the leadership of the aforementioned Daniel Rudd. Their inaugural gathering would include the audience of
President Grover Cleveland and a Mass celebrated by Fr Tolton. This group would meet annually for five years before shuttering. In 1891,
Philadelphia heiress
Saint Katharine Drexel founded the
Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, a religious order dedicated to serving the black and Native American communities, and went on to found and staff countless Black Catholic schools for that purpose. She was canonized in the year 2000.
Missions era (1890s–1950s) The Josephites From the period immediately preceding Emancipation, various
Catholic missions organizations began to dedicate themselves to the task of converting and ministering to black Americans, who were then for the most part held in slavery. Upon their gaining freedom, they became even more of a target, as a group now more freely able to choose their religious persuasion and activities. Chief among these
missionaries were the
Mill Hill Fathers, a British religious order that operated in America largely as a black missions organization. As part of their efforts, they recruited a number of candidates for the priesthood, including an African-American named
Charles Uncles. He would go on to become, in 1891, the first Black Catholic priest ordained in the United States. By 1893, the head of the Mill Hill society's American operations, Fr
John R. Slattery, had convinced the Mill Hill superior to let the American wing spin off into its own
religious society dedicated totally to African-American ministry. This would result in the founding of the
Society of St. Joseph of the Sacred Heart, most commonly known today as the Josephites. Slattery was named the first
Superior general and Fr Uncles was among the founding members, another first for a Black Catholic. Slattery founded the
Josephite Harvest, the society's missions magazine, in 1888; it remains the longest-running such publication in the United States. Racism within and outside of the society would sour the priestly experience for Fr Uncles, and he considered himself no longer a member of the order by the time of his death in 1933. For this and various other reasons, Fr Slattery would eventually resign from his post, the priesthood, and eventually
apostatize from the Church altogether in 1906. Subsequent Josephite superiors would scarcely accept or ordain blacks, and this lasted for several decades.
Comité des Citoyens In the late 19th century, Black Catholics in New Orleans began to join with Whites and other activists to oppose segregation, with the Crescent City being one of the few American locales to have previously experienced a much more interracial climate (this being while under French and Spanish rule). In 1892, the
Citizen's Committee of New Orleans () organized
direct action against the streetcar companies in the city in an attempt to force the courts to take action. This involved
Homer Plessy, a light-skinned biracial Black Catholic (and member of
St. Augustine Church), boarding a
Whites-only streetcar, informing the operator that he was Black, and being arrested. The Committee hoped that, as the resulting court case advanced, segregation laws would be overturned. Instead, the opposite occurred, and the
US Supreme Court ruled in
Plessy v. Ferguson that segregation was in fact legal nationwide. The decision would cast a dark shadow on the Black freedom struggle for the next 60 years.
New national organizations At the same time, Black Catholics began to organize once again on the national level. Another Black Catholic newspaper,
The Catholic Herald, operated during this period—though, unlike Rudd's earlier effort, TCH had the official endorsement of the Church (via
Cardinal Gibbons). One extant issue exists from 1905. In 1925, the
Federated Colored Catholics formed under the leadership of
NAACP co-founder
Thomas Wyatt Turner, and would go on to address a variety of Black Catholic concerns, including the restrictive Josephite policies concerning black applicants. The federation did not see much success on this front, however, despite friends in high places (such as the Vatican), and would undergo a split in the 1930s after two of the most powerful leaders in the group (white Jesuits
William Markoe and
John LaFarge, Jr.) steered the group in a more interracial direction (against Turner's will). The splintering would result in LaFarge's
Catholic Interracial Council of New York. LaFarge also helped found the
Cardinal Gibbons Institute in Maryland, a Catholic school established in 1924 for Black Catholics, but clashed with the school's administrators "over many of the same issues with which he disagreed with Turner", and the school closed in 1933. '''Society of African Missions, St. Anthony's Mission House, and the Franciscan Handmaids of the Most Pure Heart of Mary''' The
Society of African Missions began ministry in the United States in 1906, being given authority over Black Catholic ministry in the whole of the
Diocese of Savannah—nine years after Fr.
Ignatius Lissner first arrived stateside to promote SMA activities and fundraising. The diocese then encompassed the whole of the state of Georgia, and as such Lissner and other SMA priests were responsible for founding some of the oldest Black parishes there (including
Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church in
Atlanta, and St. Peter Claver Catholic Church in
Macon's
Pleasant Hill Historic District). During his time in Savannah, Lissner also helped found the
Franciscan Handmaids of the Most Pure Heart of Mary, in response to a Georgia law banning White teachers from teaching Black students. Lissner enlisted the help of
Mary Theodore Williams to found an order of Black nuns to teach there instead. The Handmaids were founded in 1917 and the group remained there in Georgia before following Lissner to
New Jersey in the 1920s, and later moving to New York.
Xavier University of Louisiana and Claver College In 1925, St Katharine Drexel used her fortune and connections to help found
Xavier University of Louisiana (XULA) in New Orleans, the first and only Catholic
HBCU. She also helped found a second, short-lived Black Catholic college in
Guthrie, Oklahoma, known as
Claver College; it folded 1944 after 11 years.
First Great Migration Around the same time, blacks were beginning to
migrate by the millions from the
Jim Crow South to greener pastures north of the
Mason-Dixon line and west of
Mississippi and the
Rockies. This resulted in mass exposure of traditionally-Protestant African-Americans to Catholic religion in places like Chicago, New York City, and Los Angeles. As black families moved in, white families often moved out, leaving entire parishes—and, more importantly, parochial schools—open to the new black residents. This, combined with a missionary impulse on the part of local white clerics and nuns, led to mass recruitment of black Protestants to these schools, and eventually the parishes as well. African-Americans converted in droves, perhaps most notably in Chicago. Even so,
White flight combined with Archbishop
George Mundelein's "
national parish" strategy to more or less sanctify racial segregation in Chicago, as Black Catholics—despite not technically constituting a nationality—were "consigned" to such a parish themselves.
Civil Rights era (1950s–1960s) This growth in Black Catholic laypeople as well as priests would soon coalesce with the growing
Civil rights movement to create a desire for more authentic recognition of black freedom and self-oversight within the Church, as racism and
prejudice continued to be a
thorn in the side of the booming Black Catholic community (e.g., the
Jesuit Bend Incident). However, there would come a taste of the future in 1953, when the Dominican Divine Word priest Fr
Joseph O. Bowers became the first openly-Black Catholic bishop consecrated in the United States (though for service in
Accra, in Africa); before departing for the motherland, he would ordain two black Divine Word seminarians—a black-on-black first. At that time, there were just over a hundred Black Catholic priests—compared to about 50,000 white. Bowers would attend an
ecumenical council in 1962,
Vatican II (1962–1965). When the Civil Rights Movement first began, much of the Catholic Church, black and white, was uninterested. Many that
were interested, given the potential for activist witness to
Catholic social teaching, were met with scorn and derision, especially members of religious orders. The Josephites, for example, saw
race consciousness as a threat—even a disqualifying character trait for blacks applying for their order. Many female religious orders did not allow their members, black or white, to march or protest for
civil rights. This change opened to the door for
inculturation in places where it had not been dreamed of—but also in places where it had been. As early as the 1950s, under the creative eye of Black Catholics such as Fr
Clarence Rivers, the fusion of
black Gospel music with
Catholic liturgy had been experimented with on a basic level. Rivers' music (and musical direction) was used at the first official English-language Mass in the United States in 1964, including his watershed work,
"God Is Love". Alongside this nascent inculturation came a second boom in Black Catholic numbers, as they increased by 220,000 (35%) during the 1960s—over half being converts. In 1966, Fr
Harold R. Perry became the first openly-black bishop to serve in the US when he was named
auxiliary bishop of New Orleans. Following the
assassination of Martin Luther King and its
associated riots (including
Mayor Daley's
shoot-to-kill order in Chicago), Black Catholics inaugurated a number of powerful new organizations in early 1968, including the
National Black Catholic Clergy Caucus (NBCC), organized by Fr
Herman Porter, and its sister organization, the
National Black Sisters' Conference (NBSC), organized by Sr .
Growth (1969–1971) It could be said the movement/revolution centered in Chicago, where a large number of Black Catholics resided in the late 1960s, forming sizable black parishes—though always under the leadership of white priests. Fr
George Clements, one of the more
radical(ized) members of the inaugural NBCCC meeting, entered into an extended row with
Archbishop John Cody over this lack of black pastors in Chicago and Black Catholic inculturation. Unconventional alliances with local black Protestant leaders and black radical
activists resulted in innovative (and defiant) liturgical celebrations known as
Black Unity Mass, trans-parochial events where black priests donned
Afrocentric vestments, decorated the
altar similarly, and celebrated the Mass with a decidedly "black" liturgical flair. One such Mass in 1969 included an 80-voice gospel choir provided by the
Rev. Jesse Jackson and security provided by the
Black Panthers. One of the first musicians to experiment similarly was
Grayson Warren Brown, a Presbyterian convert who set the entire Mass to gospel-style music. Fr
William Norvel, a Josephite, helped introduce gospel choirs to Black Catholic parishes nationwide (especially in D.C. and Los Angeles). This "
Gospel Mass" trend quickly spread across the nation. That same year, the NBSC, NOBC, and Black Catholic laypeople spearheaded a national campaign to stop the mass closings of Catholic schools in urban and predominantly-black communities. The unrest extended into seminaries as well—including the Josephites', where tensions between the more race-conscious black students/members and their white peers as well as teachers/elders (black and white) boiled over into open hostility, leading to an emptying of much of the seminary and the resignation of a number of Josephite priests. By 1971, the seminary had closed for studies. To this day, Josephite seminarians study at nearby universities and their vocations from black Americans has never recovered. This phenomenon of resignation was felt across Black Catholicism in the 1970s and coincided with a general
nadir of American Catholicism overall (the latter being more or less unrelated to race issues). Catholics of all races began
lapsing in droves, and between 1970 and 1975, hundreds of Black Catholic seminarians, dozens (~13%) of Black Catholic priests, and 125 black nuns (~14%) left their posts, including NBCS foundress Sr Martin de Porres Grey in 1974. Up to 20% of Black Catholics stopped practicing.
New organizations, major thinkers and USCCB letter (late 1970s) Even with the decline in vocations and lay practice during the 1970s, various new national Black Catholic organizations emerged. In 1976, the
National Association of Black Catholic Administrators (NABCA) was founded, a
consortium of the diocesan Black Catholic offices/ministries from around the country. Eventually this organization effectively replaced the NOBC, after a major conflict between the Office and the NBSC involving leadership disputes. The
Black Catholic Theological Symposium (BCTS), a yearly gathering dedicated to the promotion of Black Catholic theology, emerged in 1978 in Baltimore. From it has emerged some of the leading voices not only in Black Catholic theology, but in
Womanist and
black theology as well: writers such as Dr.
Diana L. Hayes, Dr.
M. Shawn Copeland, Sr
Jamie T. Phelps, OP, Fr
Cyprian Davis, OSB, and Servant of God
Thea Bowman have had an immeasurable impact in advancing the cause of Black Catholic history, theology,
theory, and liturgy. The next year, the
Institute for Black Catholic Studies was founded at Xavier University of Louisiana. Every summer since, it has hosted a variety of accredited courses on Black Catholic theology, ministry, ethics, and history, offering a
Continuing education & Enrichment program as well as a
Master of Theology degree—"the only graduate theology program in the western hemisphere taught from a Black Catholic perspective". That same year, the USCCB issued a
pastoral letter dissecting and condemning racism, entitled "
Brothers and Sisters to Us", for the first time addressing the issue in a group publication.
George Stallings, notable black bishops, and the Black Catholic rite (1980s – early 1990s) The end of the Black Catholic Movement could be said to have been precipitated by one Fr
George Stallings, a Black Catholic priest known for his fiery activism and no-holds-barred demands of the Church. He was a vocal leader in pressing for a Black Catholic rite (complete with bishops and the associated episcopal structure) during the 70s and 80s. He would later schism and establish the
African-American Catholic Congregation. Some of those calls were answered when
Eugene A. Marino was named auxiliary bishop of Washington in 1974, and when
Joseph L. Howze became the first openly-Black Catholic bishop of a diocese when he was named Bishop of Biloxi in 1977. Marino would become the first-ever Black Catholic
archbishop in 1988, following an open demand made to the USCCB in 1985. Marino would resign from his archbishopric two years after his appointment, following a sex scandal involving his secret marriage (and impregnation) of a Church employee. Between 1966 and 1988, the Holy See would name 13 black bishops, and in 1984 these bishops would issue their own pastoral letter entitled "
What We Have Seen and Heard", explaining the nature, value, and strength of Black Catholicism. (Also of note was one bishop,
Raymond Caesar, SVD, who was a native of
Eunice, Louisiana but was later appointed as a bishop in
Papua New Guinea in 1978. He was the first and only African American to be made a bishop of a foreign diocese, and is typically not included in lists of US black bishops.)
Revived Congress movement and liturgical explorations In 1987, the
National Black Catholic Congress (NBCC) emerged as a purported successor to Daniel Rudd's Colored Catholic Congress movement of the late 19th century, this time founded as a nonprofit under the name of Fr
John Ricard, future bishop of Pensacola-Tallahassee and future Superior General of the Josephites, in collaboration with the NABCA. Two years later in 1989,
Unity Explosion was founded in
Dallas as an annual
conference celebrating Black Catholic liturgy and expression. It would grow into a more general Black Catholic advocacy conference sponsored by the USCCB, and is preceded annually by a pre-conference, the
Roderick J. Bell Institute for African-American Sacred Music.
Watershed moments (1990s) In 1990, Benedictine Fr Cyprian Davis published "
History of Black Catholics in the United States", a book that covered the history of Black Catholics from Esteban's expedition in the 16th century all the way to the period of the late 80s. It remains the primary text for the general history of Black Catholics. That same year in July, he and his fellow Clergy Caucus members established
Black Catholic History Month, to be celebrated each year in November. In 1991, the
National Association of Black Catholic Deacons began operations, and that same year, Sr Jamie Phelps helped to restart the annual meetings of the BCTS. The aforementioned St Joseph's Black Catholic Church in Norfolk, having been merged with St Mary of the Immaculate Conception (Towson) in 1961 and
renamed as such, was named a
minor basilica in 1991—allegedly the first "black basilica" (though preceded by
Our Lady of Sorrows Basilica in Chicago) and the first minor basilica in
Virginia. Around the same time, twin Divine Word priests
Charles and
Chester Smith, with their fellow Verbites
Anthony Clark and
Ken Hamilton, established the
Bowman-Francis Ministry, a Black Catholic youth
outreach ministry, and its yearly
Sankofa Conference. At the behest of the
Black Catholic Joint Conference—the annual meeting of the NBCCC, NBSC, NBCSA and NABCD (including the deacons' wives)—a survey was taken of Black Catholics in the early 1990s to gauge the need for and interest in an independent rite; the NBCCC formed an
African American Catholic Rite Committee (AACRC) and in 1991 published a monograph entitled "
Right Rites", offering a proposal for a study that would be presented at the next year's Black Catholic Congress. Their plan was much like Stallings'. Black Catholic theologian (and future bishop)
Edward Braxton proposed an alternative plan, but neither would come to fruition. Similar proposals had been floated by the bishops themselves as far back as the
Plenary Councils of Baltimore in the 1800s, but the desire to do much for Black Catholics was incredibly sparse then and no action was taken. History repeated itself, and the AACRC disbanded after the results of the survey were released. == 21st century ==