Subversive Habits
Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $30.99
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- $30.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Williams, a history professor at the University of Dayton, brings to light in her ambitious debut the overlooked contributions of American Black Catholic nuns to the fight for civil rights. Williams provides a crucial amendment to standard histories of U.S. Catholicism and Black religion generally by focusing on the "voices of a group of Black American churchwomen whose lives, labors, and struggles have been systematically ignored," while convincingly arguing that their activism led the Church to liberalize its position on racial issues. Williams provides fascinating detail on the establishment of the influential National Black Sisters' Conference in 1968, Black nuns' victories in desegregating Catholic universities and all-white sisterhoods, and the efforts of civil rights activist Sister Mary Antona Ebo, who protested for racial justice from Selma, Ala., to Ferguson, Mo. Informative and often surprising, this should be required reading for scholars of Catholic and African American religious history and will undoubtedly become the standard text on its subject.
