The author of this volume previously produced a well-regarded and very thorough study of southern Baptists and desegregation from World War II forward. This similarly daunting and deeply researched book takes up that topic for Catholics in the American South.

I'll start with what is, for me, the most important conceptual point, historiographically speaking. The payoff in reading this massively detailed and exhaustive study is an analysis that calls into question much previous scholarship about why white Protestants in the South were so slow (at best) and resistant (more often the case) towards desegregation. Their major organizations, such as the Southern Baptist Convention, could endorse decisions such as Brown v. Board and at least passively accept the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s, but individual churches mostly fought back. Thus a gulf developed in many cases between a slightly less conservative denominational leadership, and a (mostly) recalcitrant set of congregants. One predominant argument has been that the democratic nature of southern denominations made this sort of inevitable. Church leaders could say or urge whatever they wanted, but individual churches generally took the liberty to act otherwise.

In theory, a more centralized church structure would have produced a different outcome. Enter the ideal test case: Catholicism. The bitterly ironic result: more or less the same outcome. It turned out that the religious resistance to desegregation was a reproducible result in the laboratories of the southern states during the decades after the Civil War. As Newman puts it, pro-desegregation forces knew they had the Church's teaching at their disposal, but they also had to “contend with constraints imposed by local and regional circumstances” (64). They also had to contend with a sizable contingent of pro-segregationist Catholics, who trotted out basically the same arguments as pro-segregationist forces did generally (including fears of a rising communism, the threat of miscegenation, and the insistence that racial discrimination might be wrong but that a “just discrimination based on cultural differences” was entirely reasonable (75)). Meanwhile, Catholic progressives such as Robert Lucey in San Antonio did what they could, but very cautiously. Writing to a Baltimore Catholic, for example, Lucey advised him that he could not condemn the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), but he would suggest proceeding cautiously in cooperating with it (102). Ultimately, the progressives had limited effect, and most Catholic segregationists accepted desegregation unwillingly, compelled by the “instruction of their prelates” (109). More important was the broad secular movement towards desegregation, implemented through civil rights laws. But those laws had one ironic twist: public schools certainly desegregated slowly, but they did so more quickly than Catholic schools. As a result, segregationists started sending more of their children to Catholic private schools (Protestants, of course, set up their own segregationist academies, but Catholics already had their own school system). Black Catholics resisted and, as was the case with Father George Stallings in Maryland, attempted to form separate Afro-centric Catholic institutions. For the most part, though, most African American Catholics sought to change the institutions from within. Then, in the late 1960s and forward, as civil society seemed to have dealt with questions of desegregation, white Catholics turned their attention elsewhere.

Newman provides an excellent short concluding chapter which effectively summarizes the entire work. Much of it is captured in this passage:

The rich detail, concentrated local studies, careful analysis, and sobering conclusions all make this a book that should be a standard in the field. And its main thrusts ironically match those of a much older classic in the field by John Lee Eighmy: Churches in Cultural Captivity (1972). The parallels between the white Protestant and white Catholic responses to segregation and desgregation are striking, and really far closer than I previously realized. Newman's outstanding research and carefully drawn argument should draw the attention and respect of scholars in the field, and provide a major contribution to the field of the religious history of the American South.