By the time my mother was in school in the 1950s and 1960s, there were no Black nuns ministering in Savannah. Indeed, the foundation of the schools that my mother attended had been laid by those pioneering Black nuns who were subsequently pushed out of the diocese by virulent racism. My mother was educated in Black Catholic schools in Savannah, Georgia during Jim Crow, and early in my research, I learned that two of the eight historically Black sisterhoods that had been organized in the United States were established in Savannah. SW: “I felt a host of emotions, including anger, but also a lot of fear.
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When you discovered this history about the radicalism of Black Catholic nuns being a Black Catholic woman, how did you feel when ‘providential serendipity’ led you to unearth these Black radical sisters’ activism, leadership and stories? I actually came to the project while in graduate school at Rutgers University, while searching for a paper topic for a seminar in African-American history.” Moreover, the history of Black female religious life was something that had not been taught in my public or Catholic education. However, I had no knowledge of the history of Black Catholic sisters in the United States before 2007. My mother was actually the first Black woman to graduate from the University of Notre Dame. I was baptized into the faith as an infant and raised in the Catholic Church.
Shannen Williams (SW): “It was chance, though I think providential serendipity might be the more apt description. I am curious to know how you became interested in interrogating and uncovering Black Catholic nuns’ radicalism, as it pertains to the Black liberation and freedom struggles? So much of Black women’s political leadership has been quelled, suppressed and thwarted for many reasons. Williams about what led her to discovering the radicalism of Black Catholic nuns the critical importance of expanding perspectives and definitions of radicalism and the historical and contemporary activism of Black Catholic sisters in the United States. Catholic theologians’ statement on racial injustice that initially excluded Black women and girls as victims and opponents of state and vigilante violence. Williams, in a guest blog on Patheos, publicly criticized the U.S. Williams’s work explores and interrogates the rich yet oft-ignored radical politics of Black Catholic sisters laboring and living in the United States, as they fought against racism, sexism, violence, discrimination, and white supremacy in the Catholic Church and wider society. She is completing her first book, “ Subversive Habits: The Untold Story of Black Catholic Nuns in the United States ,” which is under contract with Duke University Press.
Lepage Assistant Professor of History at Villanova University. Shannen Dee Williams wants to undo through her scholarship and research: to combat the erasure of the radical history of Black Catholic sisters by expanding definitions on and what radicalism was, is, and what it can be.Ī historian and scholar with research and teaching specializations in African-American history, Black Catholic History, Black women’s religious and political history, the history of the Black freedom struggle, and Black Womanist and feminist thought, Dr. When one thinks of radicalism, more specifically, Black radicalism, the image of a Black Catholic nun is generally not the first visual that comes to mind.
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