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This chapter introduces readers to the rise of Black Catholic Chicago in the midst of the Great Migrations of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North, both in terms of demographic growth and the establishment of an institutional infrastructure. It argues that African American migrants were introduced to Catholicism by white missionaries who reimagined Black neighborhoods as “foreign missions” in need of conversion. The chapter discusses the fraught relationships forged between missionaries and migrants, which were defined by the tension between the missionary dedication to the salvation of African Americans on the one hand and the paternalism of missionary work among those perceived to be “heathens” on the other. It introduces readers to Fr. Joseph Eckert, one of the most successful missionaries among African Americans, and his methods for conversion that served as a model for the missionaries in chapter 2.

This chapter introduces “the Living Stations of the Cross,” a Black Catholic reenactment of the passion and death of Jesus performed annually by parishioners of Chicago’s largest Black Catholic church from 1937 to 1968. This devotional practice serves as a lens through which to better understand the ways in which Catholic ritual life and relationships distinguished Catholic converts from the Protestant churches proliferating around them in the midst of the Great Migrations. It argues that Black Catholics should be understood as sharing in the same impulse as other new religious movements or “religio-racial movements,” such as the Black Hebrews and Black Muslims, who adopted religious practices and bodily disciplines that marked them as different from the assorted Black evangelical practices that were quickly coming to be understood as normative for Black religious life (known by the shorthand “the Black Church”).

This chapter begins with the ten Black bishops declaring in 1984 that Black Catholics should be “authentically Black and truly Catholic.” It contrasts this statement with the story of Mary Dolores Gadpaille, who argued in 1958 that Catholicism “lifted her up above the color line.” It juxtaposes these two examples in order to introduce readers to the central questions that govern the book. Why did tens of thousands of African Americans convert to Catholicism in the middle decades of the twentieth century? What did it mean to be Black and Catholic in the first half of the twentieth century and why did it change so dramatically in the thirty years that separated Gadpaille from the bishops? How would placing Black Catholics at the center of our historical narratives change the ways we understand African American religion and Catholicism in the United States? The chapter situates the book in scholarship and briefly introduces readers to Black Catholic history writ large.