Racial Justice Committee

Diane Judith Nash
(born May 15, 1938) is a civil rights activist, and was a leader of the student branch of the Civil Rights Movement.  She was born in Chicago, attended both public and Catholic schools.  She first attended Howard University in Washington, DC, and later transferred to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee where she helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).  

Her group’s civil rights strategic actions were among the most successful of the time.  She practiced nonviolent civil disobedience and was arrested dozens of times for it; her efforts included the first successful campaign to integrate lunch counters in Nashville. She was also an organizer of the Freedom Riders who desegregated interstate travel, and later left college in 1961 to become a full-time activist with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.  She campaigned for voting rights and school desegregation, and helped start the Alabama Voting Rights Project. She was appointed by President Kennedy to a national committee that advocated for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and her efforts further helped gain Congressional passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which authorized the federal government to oversee state practices to ensure that African Americans and other minorities were not prevented from registering and voting.

Augustus Tolton
(April 1, 1854 - July 9, 1897) was the first Black American priest in the United States.  Fr. Tolton was raised as a Catholic.  His family was enslaved and his mother was baptized as a Catholic because her owners were of the Catholic faith.  After escaping with his family, he later went to St. Peter’s Catholic School in Quincy, Illinois.  He wanted to become a priest but was not accepted at any seminary in the U.S.  He then went to study in Rome and was ordained in 1886.  He had expected to serve in a parish in Africa.  However, he was sent back to the U.S. to serve the African-American community.  He initially returned to Quincy and worked to establish a parish to minister to African-Americans there but met with resistance.  Fr. Tolton accepted a reassignment to Chicago in order to fulfill his calling to serve God.  He established St. Monica’s Catholic Church on Chicago’s South Side, and the parish grew from 30 parishioners to 600.  He successfully served his community by helping the poor and sick and feeding the hungry.  He died young at the age of 43.  Fr. Tolton was declared Venerable by Pope Francis in June 2019, the first step in the process to become a saint.

Matthew Alexander Henson
(August 8, 1866 - March 9, 1955) was born in Charles County, Maryland, the son of freeborn sharecroppers.  By Henson’s tenth birthday his parents had both died, leaving him and his siblings as orphans.  At the age of eleven, Henson was working on a merchant ship as a cabin boy and traveled to international ports.

In 1891 he met explorer Robert Peary, who learned of his experience at sea and hired him as a personal aide; the association grew into an 18-year partnership of Arctic exploration.  The duo is best known for their 1908-1909 expedition that claimed to have reached the geographic North Pole.  

Henson was a capable hunter, fisherman, and dog handler, and as a skilled carpenter and craftsman, he built and maintained all of the sledges used on their expeditions.  He was fluent in the Inuit language of the local native people who joined their expedition, and was known by all he encountered as “Matthew the Kind One.”  

Unfortunately, the racially divisive climate of the time would not give an African-American man the same standing in the public eye for the accomplishment of such a monumental feat of human achievement.  Peary was the recognized discoverer of the Pole while Henson was relegated to the role of trusty companion.  Despite Henson’s indispensable contributions to their efforts, for almost 20 years he received very little acknowledgment.  In 1912, Henson wrote A Black Explorer at the North Pole, a book that details his experiences on his journey.  

In 1954, shortly before his death in New York City, he was invited to the White House by President Dwight Eisenhower to receive a special commendation for his early work as an explorer on the behalf of the United States of America. In 1987, President Ronald Regan authorized the relocation of Henson’s remains to Arlington National Cemetery, where Peary had been laid to rest upon his death in 1920.

Sister Bertha (Thea) Bowman (December 29, 1937 - March 30, 1990) was a nun, teacher, and scholar.  Born in Mississippi, she became a Catholic when she was nine years old. 

Sister Bowman became the first African-American to join the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration in Wisconsin and she worked to share her African-American heritage in her ministry, spreading her message through song and gospel preaching; she assisted in the production of an African-American Catholic hymnal, and was a popular speaker on faith.  

Bowman helped found the National Black Sisters Conference to provide support for African-American members of Catholic religious orders.  She was diagnosed with cancer in 1984, and died in 1990.  Sister Thea Bowman had worked tirelessly to make the Church more welcoming to African-American Catholics, and was endorsed to be canonized as a saint by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2018.

Wilton Daniel Gregory
(born December 7, 1947 in Chicago) was a student at a parochial school in Chicago where he decided to convert to Catholicism at the age of 11.  He later attended Niles College (now St. Joseph’s College Seminary) of Loyola University and Saint Mary of the Lake Seminary.  He was ordained a priest on May 9, 1973.  Gregory earned a doctorate in sacred liturgy in 1980, at the Pontifical Liturgical Institute in Rome.

Gregory was ordained auxiliary bishop of Chicago on December 13, 1982, and installed as bishop of Belleville, IL, on February 10, 1994.  As bishop, Gregory served on several church committees and was vice president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (1998-2001).  He was elected president of the conference (2001-2004).

In December 2004, Gregory was appointed archbishop of Atlanta by Pope John Paul II, and he was installed the following year.  In April 2019, Pope Francis appointed Gregory archbishop of Washington.  He was the first African American to hold the post.

In October 2020, Pope Francis named Gregory cardinal, elevating him as the first African American to the Catholic Church’s highest governing body.  The appointment, which came during a turbulent year in which calls for racial justice again echoed across the United States, was seen as a message of inclusion.

Ida Bell Wells-Barnett
(July 16, 1862 - March 25, 1931) was born into slavery in Mississippi, lost both parents to Yellow Fever in 1878, and relocated to Memphis, Tennessee. She became an educator, journalist, and public speaker, who spoke out against the Jim Crow violence of the South.  

In the 1890’s, Wells documented lynching in the United States in newspaper articles and through her pamphlet called Southern Horrors:  Lynch Law in all its Phases.  Wells exposed lynching as a barbaric practice that Whites in the South used to intimidate and oppress African-Americans.  

After the destruction of her printing office by a White mob and repeated threats of violence against her, she again relocated, this time to Chicago, and there continued her advocacy.  An early leader in the Civil Rights Movement, she was also one of the founders of the NAACP, advocated for women’s rights and was active in the women’s suffrage movement. In 1913 Wells-Barnett traveled from Chicago to Washington, DC to march in the nationally organized Women’s Suffrage parade, where despite her notoriety she was denied the right to join the Illinois delegation in the ranks; Blacks were to be relegated to the very rear of the procession, but she later defied their orders by joining the Illinois group mid-parade.  

Over the course of a lifetime dedicated to combating prejudice and violence, she fought for equality, especially that of women; at the height of her activity, she was likely the most well-known Black woman in America.   In 2020, Wells was posthumously honored with a Pulitzer Prize special citation for her reporting on violence and lynching.

Elizabeth (Bessie) Coleman
(January 26, 1892 - April 30, 1926) was an early American aviation pioneer.  Born in Texas, her mathematical ability in school led her to Langston University in Oklahoma, a land grant Black college, before moving north to Chicago. 

She developed an early interest in flying, but African-Americans, Native Americans, and women had no flight training opportunities in the United States.  Undeterred, she saved her money earned as a manicurist and restaurant manager, and obtained sponsorships from two Black philanthropists to go to France for flight school.  She earned her pilot license in France on June 15, 1921, and was the first Black person to earn an international pilot’s license.

Coleman became a popular ‘barnstorming’ stunt pilot in dangerous air shows in the United States, as racial and gender bias forbade a commercial career. She hoped to start a school for African-American fliers, but did not live long enough to do so.  She died in a plane crash in 1926 while testing a new aircraft.  Her groundbreaking role was an inspiration to early pilots and to the African-American and Native American communities.

Dr. Daniel Hale Williams
(January 18, 1856 - August 4, 1931) was an African-American physician who performed the first open heart surgery.  After graduation from Northwestern University Medical School in 1883, he opened his own medical office in Chicago.  Determined that Chicago should have a hospital where both black and white doctors could study and where black nurses could receive training, Williams rallied for a hospital open to all races. After months of hard work, he opened Provident Hospital and Training School for Nurses on May 4, 1891; it was the country’s first interracial hospital and nursing school.

In 1893, Williams was presented with a patient who had been stabbed in the heart.  Medical textbooks of the time said that operating on a human heart was too dangerous, and there was no precedent for opening the chest. Des- pite lacking X-rays, antibiotics, adequate anesthesia, or other tools of modern surgery, Williams stepped in and successfully repaired the damage to the man’s heart; the patient was able to walk out of the hospital less than two months later. 

Open heart surgery is one of the most delicate and dangerous procedures imaginable, requiring the utmost skill even in today’s modern operating rooms, yet Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, an African-American, astonishingly managed that feat in 1893.

"Just Mercy" Movie Night

"Hidden Figures" Movie Night

4 week discussion group of "Open Wide Our Hearts"
(the U.S. Bishop's pastoral letter on racism)

USCCB's Committee Against Racism - click HERE

ADW's Anti-Racism Initiative - click HERE