A response by a historian to America’s recent coverage of the path to completion by the Sisters of Charity of New York notes shock and disappointment at the lack of reckoning with the impact of the longstanding anti-Black and anti-brown admissions policies and practices that most European and white American congregations employed.
Shannen Dee Williams
Dr. Shannen Dee Williams is the Albert LePage Assistant Professor of History at Villanova University. She is completing her first book, Subversive Habits: The Untold Story of Black Catholic Nuns in the United States.
Posted inArts & Culture, Last Take
I wrote the first full history of Black Catholic nuns in the U.S. Here’s what I learned.
Writing the first full history of Black Catholic women religious in the United States, Shannen Dee Williams experienced the gamut of human emotions.
Posted inFaith, Faith in Focus
What a forgotten Black nun can teach us about racism and Covid-19
Since the outbreak of Covid-19, I have thought often about Sister Mary Anthony Duchemin and the extraordinary sacrifice that she made to the church and community at large in 1832.
Posted inFaith, Faith in Focus
The black Catholic nun every American should know
When Anne Marie Becraft established her school in the midst of the nation’s and the church’s slaveholding elite, she powerfully declared that the lives of black people, especially women and girls, mattered.
Posted inFaith, Last Take
Religious orders owning slaves isn’t new—black Catholics have emphasized this history for years
Black Catholics have been at the forefront of the push to get the Vatican to confront the church’s racist past and present.
Posted inFaith, Faith in Focus
Sister Antona Ebo’s lifelong struggle against white supremacy, inside and outside the Catholic Church
On Nov. 11, the Catholic Church lost a moral titan in the long struggle for racial equality and justice in the United States.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Emmett Till: the lynching that shook the conscience of the world
One cannot begin to understand the current deterioration of American race relations without confronting the enduring realities of white supremacy present in the case of Emmett Till.