Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle

by Shannen Dee Williams

In  Subversive Habits , Shannen Dee Williams provides the first full history of Black Catholic nuns in the United States, hailing them as the forgotten prophets of Catholicism and democracy. Drawing on oral histories and previously sealed Church records, Williams demonstrates how master narratives of women’s religious life and Catholic commitments to racial and gender justice fundamentally change when the lives and experiences of African American nuns are taken seriously. For Black Catholic women and girls, embracing the celibate religious state constituted a radical act of resistance to white supremacy and the sexual terrorism built into chattel slavery and segregation. Williams shows how Black sisters—such as Sister Mary Antona Ebo, who was the only Black member of the inaugural delegation of Catholic sisters to travel to Selma, Alabama, and join the Black voting rights marches of 1965—were pioneering religious leaders, educators, healthcare professionals, desegregation foot soldiers, Black Power activists, and womanist theologians. In the process, Williams calls attention to Catholic women’s religious life as a stronghold of white supremacy and racial segregation—and thus an important battleground in the long African American freedom struggle.

Genres: Religion, History, Nonfiction, Politics, Audiobook, Research, Catholic

424 pages, Paperback

Published May 17, 2022

Reviews

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

And then you find out that Sister Act was based on a true story. Not the part about a showgirl who is Whoopi Goldberg integrating a convent through the witness protection program while she teaches nuns about pop music and some mob guys are after her, and then there's a sequel with high school. A real nun named Sister Thea Bowman did great works in our time and Whoopi Goldberg and Harry Belafonte had plans to collaborate on a documentary about Sister Bowman when she died prematurely in 1990 at the age of 52 and the documentary became something else. This book! The Catholic Church! These women's dedication! I had no idea. Shannen Dee Williams begins at the beginning, before there were Northern Europeans and Puritans and Protestants and a promised land, there were Spaniards and slavery on the American continents. The murky historical time, when slaves weren't supposed to convert to Christianity, but some did, and then they were encouraged to, and the convoluted hypocrisy enslavers went through while enslaving their fellow Christians, rolls up into the early 1800s when the first African-descended Catholic nuns took vows. Some did it through inheritance, some by passing, some through Louisiana's long history of colorism. But they were there. When you think of America in its first fifty years, you don't think "nuns," but they were there and they were integrating and doing works until, by 1852, when Uncle Tom's Cabin was published and I wondered how Simon LeGree's enslaved house woman received a convent education as a girl, the answer is, "Because convent education for African-descended girls existed." After slavery, plenty of African-Americans left the faith because the institutional Catholic Church was not going to do anything for freedmen, and Jim Crow discouraged vocations and mixed-race convents, but by the time things start to get going in the 20th century, there were three religious orders for African-descended women operating in the US and doing good works, including running high-performing schools with little help from the Church or anyone. The complex and racist history of nuns in education takes up a lot of this book and it's important, and the disillusion of quality Catholic education in majority Black neighborhoods is a tragedy. The fight to become nuns, whether to integrate or join an African-American order, and what nuns went through once they had integrated a convent; the author has done an incredible job finding nuns and former nuns who did this work. Towards the end, she addresses early deaths among nuns as well as male clergy, because the stress of integrating and the work of being some of the first African-Americans in these roles in the modern church was enough to make incredible people age and die early. At the end, the decline in vocations and the new surge of religious women from Africa are where we are now, but what an incredible story that we have not heard before. Lots of inspiring Catholic African-American women fighting for their faith against disappointing Catholic hierarchies. This is mandatory reading.

[Joe McMahon · Rating 5 out of 5]

The extensive footnotes and bibliography begin on page 271. This thorough history is not a quick read. The author relates many important details as she narrates two centuries of Black religious sisters in the United States. She effectively describes the white supremacist attitudes of too many Catholic bishops, pastors, and personnel of white religious orders that taught in Black schools.
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The group photographs add much to the book.
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The narrative ends in 2018. It seems that Black Sisters from Anglophone Africa now outnumber the African priests helping parishes in the United States.

[Seanan DeGrave · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptional book, well-researched. A clear view into racism and prejudice in the history of the Catholic Church in America, but an equal and much-needed eye for how Black women have done the heavy lifting to overcome. Sisters have been in the background of the Church for so long, and Black sisters even more so. A wonderful tribute to the priceless contributions of Black sisters.

[Erica · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Dry but super informative!

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a really powerful read that illuminated a lot of powerful and necessary history.

[James Puglisi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African America Freedom Struggle” is the latest work of Shannen Dee Williams, Ph.D., a noted scholar of history particularly in the area of women’s, religious, and black freedom movements.

While the work’s focus is upon the USA Roman Catholic Church as an institution, the parallels revealed can be found in most institutions in the USA that were founded remained controlled by white culture, and thus serves as a window into how institutions have operated regarding the treatment and systemic racism directed towards blacks, as well as the misogyny that compounded the impact upon women. This is not a work of theology, but of the history and actions of people and of an institution. It is a story of resilience and commitment by a community that continues to push for justice and equity in their own “home.”

If you are a Roman Catholic, this is a must read for anyone looking at a history of the Church in the United States that has largely been ignored and more often erased. For my Black Catholic sisters and brothers, I pray this work will only confirm what you already know about the resilience of your community and of your faith. For my fellow white Catholics, this is a history we MUST come to terms with if we are to truly calls ourselves followers of Jesus.

[Ron Scrogham · Rating 4 out of 5]

From the conclusion: "In offering the first full accounting of Black Catholic sisters in the long African American freedom struggle, "Subversive Habits" has recovered a consequential chapter in American and religious history. In illuminating Black sisters' foundational roots in the US Church, this book has made visible the other (and ongoing) transatlantic story of North American Catholicism--the one beginning with Africans and African-descended people living in Europe and Africa in the sixteenth century. In telling Black sisters' stories of resistance and perseverance in the fight to make their church truly catholic and their nation truly democratic, "Subversive Habits" has also made the case for why scholars must center the experiences of Black women and girls in the history of US 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." (pp. 264-265)

[K Kriesel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely powerful book, it's been a long time coming and Williams did an incredible job. I had high expectations and this far surpassed them!

I was raised Catholic in Chicago & Milwaukee in the 80's-00's and so many pieces of my childhood came together while I read this. And after 16 years of studying [white] Catholic feminist theology & leaving it behind because of its heteronormativity & whiteness, learning about the racism of that movement's foundresses was unsurprising but painful. This history must be known by EVERYONE

[Charles Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

When you start this book, be prepared to have everything you thought you knew about the history of Catholicism in the U. S. challenged and uprooted. Williams has taken on the canon of academic sources on this topic for the last 40 years and shown them all to be shortsighted at best, apologists for racism and sexism at worst. For me, personally, as a scholar of the civil rights movement, my world has been rocked too. From her introduction, I recognized what a groundbreaking work of scholarship this was, and I could not put it down. The footnotes and references were a gold mine of information. Luckily, my nearest public library had a single copy of this book but the two academic libraries that I can access locally did not. This led me to believe that shock waves from this tsunami of a book have not yet washed over the general reading public. Read it, by all means, and be prepared for a wild ride!

This review is not an endorsement of amazon.com or any business owned by Jeff Bezos. Books for my reviews were checked out from a public library, purchased from a local brick-and-mortar book shop, or ordered from my favorite website for rare and out-of-print books.

[Teresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I struggled with this book. There were inconsistencies with how the author presented her thesis. She made some statements in the first chapter that really made it hard for me to finish this book. The first was that she states that the sisters of SSF had slaves but did not treat them harshly like white people did. Yet she gives no evidence to show how she came to this conclusion. Secondly she writes a whole paragraph on Martha Healy but leaves her sister Eliza as a mere mention in the conclusion of the chapter and a long footnote. But does not state why Eliza, who had a far more illustrious career in the Church than Martha, was important to the history of the Black Catholic Church.

I did end up finishing the book, however after struggling through the first chapter, I find that I did not actually enjoy the experience as much has I had hoped.

[Lexi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love this. this is a dense very non fiction read but it depicts the racism in the catholic church so well and helped me put to words why I left catholicism in 2020 as a cradle catholic… just a clear history of how the catholic church continuously fights racial equality. It’s heartening though to learn of the Black nuns who continuously fight though. I wish I had known some of these women in my own journey

[Sister · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerful. A necessary read. I tip my hat to the “Sister Sisters”, black women religious who fought to get into Eurocentric communities, fought to stay there and fought to decanter their Eurocentrism.

[Bernie Tomasso · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a White Catholic Male, I found this a disturbing book. The discrimination of Black women who wished to enter religious life and those who did enter was disconcerting which is why I had to put the book down so many times.

[Kate]

This felt like a thesis published as a general release so it had lots of anecdotes that weren’t as cohesive, but the overarching story of racism and the experience of Black nuns in the US was quite interesting.

[Theresa · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a densely researched work of history. It fills a niche in the history of racism in North American Catholicism. I would have enjoyed it better if it had had less detail.

[Ingrid Grant · Rating 5 out of 5]

A powerful and illuminating read.

[Ted Prezelski · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me a while to finish this. It's not a comfortable history to read about my church, but I was introduced to some remarkable, heroic women.

[Will Whitmore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptional text- well researched and written. A wonderful addition to the history of the Roman Catholic Church in the US

[woof · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly eye opening and fascinating insight on black religious life. Very much recommended it is more academic than anything which is only a plus for me!