The tall, frail woman in the wheelchair lifted her hands high above her head in praise. She was plainly tired and in pain, but her countenance was as radiant as the brightly colored African robe she wore. In a deep, soulful voice, she was leading a song: “Oh, deep in my heart, I know, I do believe, we shall overcome someday!”
From the podium, she could see what looked like a sea of men dressed in black clerical garb. Arms crossed and joined, they swayed together like one body, some weeping openly, some choking back tears.
It was 1989, and in an address at the annual meeting of the American Catholic bishops, Sister Thea Bowman had asked them to join hands and pray, in song, for the courage to lead people in the struggle against racism in the country and in the Church.
“To be black and Catholic still often feels like being a second- or third-class citizen of the holy city,” she told the bishops. “The Church … is a family of families, and the family got to stay together. We know that if we do stay together, if we walk and talk and work and play and stand together in Jesus’ name, we’ll be who we say we are, truly Catholic.
“And we shall overcome—overcome the poverty, the loneliness, the alienation, and build together a holy city, a new Jerusalem, a city set apart, where they’ll know we are His because we love one another.”
Nine months later, Sister Thea was dead, losing her five-year battle with bone cancer. She had spent more than half of her 52 years as a Franciscan Sister of Perpetual Adoration, proclaiming the light of Christ, working to open eyes made blind by racism, and to awaken people deadened by prejudice and injustice.
“I was an old folks’ child,” she told an interviewer just months before her death. And she died in her parents’ home in Canton, Mississippi, not far from where she was born in 1937. Thea was a granddaughter of slaves; her mother was a teacher and her father a physician, one of the few black doctors in a region where many white doctors refused to treat blacks.
Sister Thea often said she was taught values and history on the knees of her parents and at the feet of her relatives and neighbors. From them, she learned the freedom songs and spirituals of her ancestors. She called them “songs of home, of crossing, of rest.” In her latest ministry, Thea handed on those songs to countless others, singing them in a voice that was blue, lonesome, and haunting.
Early Lessons
Her first lessons about racism came from her mother. She told Thea about Frederick Douglass, the escaped slaves and human rights leader who was made to ride in the cattle car of the train on his way to a meeting with President Abraham Lincoln. “Frederick said, ‘They’re putting me in a cattle car did not disgrace me; it disgraced them,’” Thea’s mother told her.
One day, when Thea came home badmouthing the “cracker” kids at school, she was sternly rebuked by her mother. “‘We don’t talk like that in this house,’” Thea remembered her mother saying. “‘If they want to act like that, that’s their business, and we pray for them. But we speak of them with respect.’”
In an interview shortly before her death, Thea reflected on the wisdom of her mother’s teaching that day: “I thought my mama was crazy. But as I have grown up, I understood what she was trying to do. She was always saying that if I hate—no matter what the reason—the hatred eats into my heart and eats into my soul. If I can be a loving person and a caring person—that doesn’t mean I’m supposed to take the abuse—but it means I have to have an understanding heart and understand how they were raised and understand that somehow they need help.”
Those early lessons helped Thea learn to love bigots and racists, whom she encountered even in the convent. She had wanted to be a nun ever since attending a high school run by the Franciscan Sisters. At a time when white school systems were closed to blacks, Catholic religious men and women came to Mississippi to educate black people. Sister Thea attributed her decision to be baptized Catholic to their example.
In the convent, however, she discovered that despite their good works, her white sisters could not yet look upon her as an equal.
Convent life was “cold, cold and white,” she said, and her sisters would joke in front of her about “nigger toes” and “nigger heaven.” At the time of her death, she remained the only black woman in her order.
But Thea persevered, earned a doctorate degree in English Literature from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and spent the rest of her days teaching African-American pride and racial reconciliation in high schools and colleges across the country.
‘Somebodyness’
For black children in the inner city, she had this advice: “If anybody asks you who you are, just tell ’em you’re a child of God. … Say, ‘I’m somebody. I might be poor, but I’m somebody. My mama might be on drugs, but I’m somebody. My daddy might be in jail, but I’m somebody. You might think I’m slow, but I’m somebody. I’m God’s child.”
She taught of the long legacy of African gifts to world civilization and the Church, and the continued sufferings of her people at the hands of whites, especially in America.
“Our history includes enslavements, oppression, and exploitation,” she said. “As Malcolm X said, ‘My folks, most of them, didn’t come over here on the Mayflower; they came over here on slave ships, in chains.’”
She spoke of how black slaves “helped build this nation,” its agricultural system, its roads and railroads, its national monuments, even its churches; of how working in their masters’ homes, black women were the teachers and nurturers of young whites.
“Despite all this,” she said in 1989, “blacks in the ’80s are still struggling, still scratching and crawling, as the old folks said, still trying to find home in the homeland and home in the Church, still struggling to gain access to equal opportunity.”
She was critical of the Church for paying only lip service to being a universal religion that embraces all cultures. In America, especially, Thea felt that many white Catholics had imbibed an attitude of racial superiority.
“To pray together when are hearts are not one, when we’re not at least trying to bridge the gap, is sacrilege,” she charged.
She posed her vivid hopes for the Church in the form of a challenge to all Catholics: “Can you see yourself in a Church where there are people who are black, people who are white, people who are brown? Where there are people of Asian heritage, Australian native heritage? Where all of us come together really being ourselves and sharing our sorrows and our joys and our goals and our determinations? How rich we would be!”
She stressed that Roman Catholics were part of a “world Church,” often noting that there are more Catholics in Africa than in America and that the number of African Catholics grows by 200 each day.
She said that the celebration of the Eucharist should be a daily “uniting with the suffering Church throughout the world—in Rome and Northern Ireland, in Syria and Lebanon, in South Africa and Angola, India and China, Nicaragua and El Salvador, in Washington, D.C. and Jackson, Mississippi.”
Christian Living
Sister Thea lived in constant physical pain for the last four years of her life. Near the end, she was asked by an interviewer to look back on how she lived her life.
“I have tried in my life to make a day-by-day decision that I want to live joyfully,” she replied. “I want to be good news to other people; I want to feel good about me; and I want to help you feel good about yourself. So I try to laugh, I try to smile, I try to find the source of inner joy and strength.”
A few days before she died, Sister Thea gave her last gift to the Church and her people. Too weak to get out of bed, she dictated her reflections on Holy Week for the diocesan newspaper in Jackson, Mississippi. They stand as a meditation on the Christian meaning of suffering and redemption, and an approach to Christian living:
“So often we get caught up in the hurry of daily living. As individuals and as families, reserve prime time to be with Jesus—to see Him rejected, mocked, spat upon, beaten, and forced to carry a heavy cross. To hear the echo of the hammer, to feel the agony of the torn flesh and strained muscles. To know Mary’s anguish as He hung three hours before He died.
“We recoil before the atrocities of war, gang crime, domestic violence, and catastrophic illness. Unless we personally and immediately are touched by suffering, it is easy to read Scripture and to walk away without contacting the redemptive suffering that makes us holy. The reality of the Word falls on deaf ears…
“Sharing the pain of a fellow human will enliven Scripture and help us enter into the holy mystery of the redemptive suffering of Christ. … We unite ourselves with Christ’s redemptive work when we reconcile, when we make peace, when we share the good news that God is in our lives, when we reflect to our brothers and sisters God’s healing, God’s forgiveness, God’s unconditional love.”
Originally published in The Evangelist (March 18, 1993)
© David Scott 2009. All rights reserved.
