Parish boundaries
Subtitle: the Catholic encounter with race in the twentieth-century urban North
By: John T. McGreevy.
Series: Historical studies of urban America
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Chicago
Language: eng
Number of pages: 362
Subjects: African Americans -- Northeastern States -- Social conditions; Discrimination in housing -- Northeastern States -- History -- 20th century; Race relations -- Religious aspects -- Catholic Church; Community; Parishes -- Northeastern States -- History -- 20th century; Northeastern States -- Race relations
Description: Steeples topped by crosses still dominate neighborhood skylines in many American cities, silent markers of local worlds rarely examined by historians. In Parish Boundaries, John McGreevy chronicles the history of these Catholic parishes and connects their unique place in the urban landscape to the course of American race relations in the twentieth century.

In vivid portraits of parish life in Boston, Chicago, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, and other cities, McGreevy examines the contacts and conflicts between Euro-American Catholics and their African-American neighbors. He demonstrates how the territorial nature of the parish - more bound by geography than Protestant or Jewish congregations - kept Catholics in their neighborhoods, and how this commitment to place complicated efforts to integrate urban neighborhoods.

He also shows how the church responded to the growing number of African-American parishioners by condemning racism, and how this teaching was received in communities rocked by racial strife. Taking the story through the Second Vatican Council and the civil rights movement of the 1960s, McGreevy demonstrates how debates about community and racial justice helped trigger a more general reevaluation of the character of American Catholicism.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.