Katharine Drexel, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, and Race
Katharine Drexel devoted her life and significant fortune to building educational and religious institutions to serve African American and Native American youth. Drexel’s support for Native American boarding schools is explored on the previous page. How can primary sources inform our understanding of how Katharine Drexel and her order, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament (SBS), felt about a racially segregated America?
As to Drexel’s own thoughts on the matter, early in her religious life, we can look to her personal correspondence with her uncle Anthony J. Drexel. Katharine’s words capture her concerns about a prospective white postulant being able to reckon with the prevalent bigotry of the time. Katharine wrote succinctly about her concerns regarding a prospective sister’s ability to “overcome race repugnance” (See letter from Katharine Drexel to Anthony J. Drexel, April 10, 1890.) In addition, an 1895 newspaper article captured Katharine’s final religious vows, which included this promise,
“to be the mother and servant of the Indian and negro races, according to the rule and constitutions of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and colored people; nor shall I undertake any work which may lead to the neglect or abandonment of the Indian and colored races.”
A Segregated Country
While the order’s work focused completely on working on behalf of African Americans and Native Americans, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament chose not to integrate their sisterhood until 1950. When asked about the SBS’s all-white membership, the organization referenced a verbal request from leaders of Black religious orders such as the Oblate Sisters of Providence and the Sisters of the Holy Family (SSF). However, historian Shannen Dee Williams has found no evidence of any such discussion. Williams points to “an 1896 entry from the SBS annals [that] recounts the 1893 congregational vote taken to formally exclude African and Native American women from admission”1 as the main factor for segregation.
Additionally, the SBS built segregated institutions, even in the North. When the SBS funded a church in Cleveland, Ohio for the express use of the Black community, there was pushback among the African American community. (See clipping, below, from the African American newspaper the Chicago Defender, “No Segregation, Says Bishop of Catholic Church: Lay Cornerstone For Separate Edifice In Cleveland, Ohio; Structure To Cost $25,000.”) In response, Catholic leadership responded:
“In establishing a separate church for the people, the bishop said, there is not the slightest idea in the mind of the church to segregate them. He said that there are many churches among non-Catholic denominations exclusively for the Race, and it is because they feel more at home in their own parish that the new church was established.”
Were these examples of segregation due to the SBS’s inability to see white and non-white people as equal or out of a fear of racist violence? Building integrated schools or churches could make the order and their outposts vulnerable and threaten the order’s mission.
A stick of dynamite was reportedly found on the building site of the SBS Motherhouse, in the order’s early years. The SBS experienced community protests over school openings (typically focused on the opening of schools for African American students). A petition was filed, in 1921, by white New Orleanians in objection to the SBS’s plans to open an athletic field for African American students. (See clipping, below, from the African American newspaper the New York Amsterdam News, “New Orleans Residents Protest Street’s Closing.”) In 1922, the revitalized Klu Klux Klan (a group that was racist, antisemitic, and anti-Catholic) threatened the opening of a church school in Beaumont, Texas.2
Negative response to African American schools and churches built or staffed by the SBS was due, in-part, to anti-Catholic hostility common among the dominant Protestant culture that saw Catholics as fundamentally apart, superstitious, and loyal to foreign powers. However, a majority of the fear and animosity towards the work of the SBS came down to explicit racism.
At the time when the order was most active (1890-1930s), they were considered quite socially and politically radical, even as the sisters maintained elements of racial disparity well into the mid-century. However, during the last decade of her active leadership of the SBS, Katharine Drexel shared her hope for a future where souls were recognized as equal and not divided by race. Recorded in the SBS Annals from 1932, Drexel wished for Americans to accept,
“that one out of every ten people in this country is a Negro, and that everyone has an immortal soul made to the image and likeness of God which is made for Heaven and redeemed by Christ’s Passion and Death. He shares in the common dignity of a human being regardless of his nationality or race.”3
1 Shannen Dee Williams. “‘You Could Do the Irish Jig, But Anything African Was Taboo’: Black Nuns, Contested Memories, and the 20th Century Struggle to Desegregate U.S. Catholic Religious Life.” The Journal of African American History 102, no. 2. (2017): 154.
2 Amanda Bresie. Veiled Leadership: Katharine Drexel, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, and Race Relations. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of American Press, 2023): 268-270.
3 Amanda Bresie. Veiled Leadership, 271.