In April 1968, nearly two weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., members of the newly formed National Black Catholic Clergy Caucus gathered in Detroit to declare that the Catholic Church was “primarily a white racist institution.”
Detroit’s Archbishop John Dearden, one of the most progressive bishops in the country, had already been cultivating Black Catholic leadership throughout the city—work that had taken on new urgency following the 1967 Detroit Rebellion—and the caucus’s declaration only deepened that commitment. Black culture began reshaping Catholic worship: gospel music replaced Eurocentric hymns, African drummers performed at Black-history programs, and a local artist painted a Black Christ mural on the dome above the altar of St. Cecilia Church, drawing national attention to the everyday religious experiences and expressions of the city’s Black Catholics.
By the end of the decade, Detroit had become the beating heart of the national Black Catholic Movement.
In the first episode of Commonweal’s new podcast series, The City and the Cross, host and inaugural Centennial Fellow Aaron Robertson traces the origins and flowering of Black Catholic Detroit throughout the twentieth century—from the era of Jim Crow, when Black Catholics were regularly excluded from white parishes, through the 1960s and ‘70s, when the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council coincided with the civil-rights and Black Power movements.
He speaks with the musicians who transformed Catholic liturgy by bringing gospel into the sanctuary, the parishioners who built Black Catholic communities from scratch, and the activists who compelled the local Church to recognize Black leadership.
Featured Voices:
- Marjorie Gabriel-Burrow, a musician who helped bring Black musical styles into Catholic Mass;
- Shirley Harris-Slaughter, a parishioner whose church closed in the 1980s, foreshadowing larger closures to come;
- Norah Duncan IV, a nationally acclaimed composer;
- Jackie Mahome, a mother who introduced Black history programming into a local Black Catholic church, and her daughter Michelle McKinney, who witnessed its transformative power;
- Dr. M. Shawn Copeland, a former nun from Detroit, now one of the world’s leading Catholic theologians;
- Wyatt Jones III, the son of Wyatt Jones Jr., a prominent Black Catholic leader and former Black Panther;
- Judith McNeeley, the daughter of Deacon Allen McNeeley, a Black lay leader who trained priests and parishioners in racial justice work;
- Father Tom Lumpkin, a founding member of the Detroit Catholic Pastoral Alliance;
- Father Donald Archambault, a white priest committed to cross-racial ministry;
- and Dr. Shannen Dee Williams, a historian of Black Catholicism.
Episode 2, “A Padlock on All the Doors,” airs next Wednesday, July 17.
For more information about the series, click here. To learn more about Commonweal’s Centennial Fellowship, click here.