Judge McFarland and
the Black Catholic Movement
Father Lawrence Lucas celebrates Mass in vestments of red, black, and green — the colors of the Black Liberation Flag — circa 1970. To read more about Father Lucas and other activists in the Black Catholic Movement, check out my (Cressler’s) book Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration.
(Photo courtesy Father David Endres’s personal collection.)
As you can see, Black student activism at Notre Dame is just one of countless stories Arthur could tell. After receiving his J.D. from the University of Virginia and beginning his legal career with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in Harlem, he returned home. There he served as Municipal Court Judge for the city of Charleston for 33 years (chief judge for 28).
Arthur’s return home coincided with his return to the Catholic church, something he credited to one Father Egbert Figaro, C.S.Sp. The Spiritan priests had ministered to Black Catholic Charleston since the early twentieth century. In 1967, they oversaw the merger of the (Black) St. Peter Claver Mission with (white) St. Patrick Catholic church. The merger was meant to desegregate the two parishes, yet all but four or five white families fled St. Patrick for the suburbs.
It was Father Figaro’s arrival in 1978 that truly transformed the community and brought Arthur back into the fold. Figaro was a Black Trinidadian American and, to quote Arthur:
“[Figaro] came in on a mission to change the view of Catholicism and the mindset around Catholicism. [To emphasize] the importance of [the] infusion of African American culture, African and African-American culture in the liturgy. And that's what he did.”
In other words, Father Figaro was part of the Black Catholic Movement. Inspired by the Black Power movement and invited by the Second Vatican Council to incorporate their cultures into religious life, Black Catholic priests, sisters, and lay people set about transforming Black Catholic life in the 1960s and 1970s. By 1984, the ten Black bishops of the United States declared that “the Black Catholic community in the American Church has now come of age” and, among other things, was free to worship in ways that were both “authentically Black” and “truly Catholic.”