Search Results

The early 1970s saw growing disillusionment among southern African American Catholics with diocesan desegregation policies that had produced little desegregation, ignored blacks in the decision-making process and deprived black communities of valued institutions, leaving their members often feeling unwelcome in formerly white schools and churches. In response, the vast majority of prelates continued, and some, occasionally, built new, de facto black churches, no longer viewing them as unacceptable signs of segregation but as a vital part of the Church’s outreach to the African American community. In 1989, George A. Stallings Jr. broke with the Catholic Church by forming Imani Temple and inaugurating the independent African-American Catholic Congregation. Most African American Catholics did not follow him out of the church, although many sympathized with his criticism of racism within it. Blacks in the South and nation remained underrepresented among Catholic clergy and religious and on the staff of diocesan agencies.

This chapter examines what the leaders of the First Afrikan Church taught the members about “who they were and whose they were,” with particular attention to the relationship between blackness and the Bible. In addition, it examines the contradictions between racial understandings of the self through an Afrocentric reading of the Bible and racial understandings of the self when considered in secular contexts. There is a significant shift in how blackness is defined and understood among the members when considered in everyday settings as compared to biblical contexts. In the secularized definitions of blackness, the church members' middle-class status becomes particularly salient.

This chapter focuses on how Afrocentrism is defined and integrated into understandings of self and enacted through bodily and linguistic behaviors by the members of the First Afrikan. It describes the conversion rituals of the First Afrikan members and the ways in which these rituals are engaged to signal membership to outsiders, to nurture the bonds between those in the community, and to remind the convert of her more authentically African blackness. Importantly, the same act of Afrocentric blackness may be interpreted differently by observers and among practitioners. Thus, a consideration of these rituals provides insight into how Afrocentrism is performed and demonstrates the varied meanings of blackness embedded within those performances.

This chapter tells the story of Irene and Jack Delano, who took at least nineteen photographs of an African-American congregation in Heard County, Georgia. The series began with a picture of four women, one carrying a child, walking down a dusty road toward the church. Other photographs show the gathered men dressed in suits and hats, chatting with one another. In one picture, Delano creates an elegant composition by filming the men underneath a massive tree bounded by a car and the church. Eventually, Jack Delano took a group picture of the deacons and minister, lined up against the side of the church. Moving inside, he filmed the “fellow with a booming voice,” prayers and preaching, and the attentive congregation. Three photographs are of the church's minister. Delano explains in his captions that this man lived in an old converted schoolhouse with his wife and two grandchildren, while his children had moved out of Heard County. Delano posed the couple underneath framed portrait photographs taken of them twenty years earlier.