One True Church: An American Story of Race, Family, and Religion

Ridgely (When I Was a Child), a professor of religion at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, chronicles in this meticulous account the growth of an interracial Catholic community in Newton Grove, N.C., from the 1870s through the segregation era and beyond. Contrary to Gone with the Wind–style lore, Ridgely writes, plantation life fostered interracial association in Southern households (though “unequal status” permeated “nearly every interaction”), and it was traces of this former coexistence that the post-Reconstruction push for segregation sought to erase. In this context, in the 1870s, white Southerner John Carr Monk founded the Newton Grove parish after converting to Catholicism, whose doctrine of a “singular Body of Christ” he saw as validating his idea for an interracial church community where he could worship alongside his mixed-race half brother, Solomon Monk. Carr founded the parish as “interracial, albeit internally segregated,” with seating arrangements separating the races. A brief period of outright segregation began in 1939 and desegregation occurred in 1953. Ridgely makes clear throughout that Monk was no radical (his Southern upbringing and later medical studies in the North had imbued him with the racism of his day), and that the parish he founded was no “utopia” but a community that sought unity without equality as it struggled to maintain itself within the demands of the South’s white supremacist framework. Historians of American Catholicism will want this on their bookshelves. (Mar.)