White Catholic priests led local campaigns enforcing residential segregation.

Evidence

Church involvement and leadership were commonplace in property owners’ associations that were organized to maintain neighborhood segregation. In North Philadelphia in 1942, a priest spearheaded a campaign to prevent African Americans from living in the neighborhood. The same year, a priest in a Polish American parish in Buffalo, New York, directed the campaign to deny public housing for African American war workers, stalling a proposed project for two years. Just south of the city, 600 units in the federally managed project for whites went vacant, while African American war workers could not find adequate housing. — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long, 201

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Rothstein’s The Color of Law, which establishes the government’s role in residential segregation that churches then enforced locally. — connects to: The US Catholic Church practiced racial segregation exceeding all other denominations — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 194; Catholic clergy organized white resistance to integrated housing in Detroit — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 196; Catholic bishops shifted resources to white suburban parishes while abandoning black inner-city churches — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 197 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Northern Catholic parishes enforced rigid racial segregation even in New York. #corroborates (0.92) — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long, 35
• Northern whites expressed abundant support for segregation #corroborates (0.90) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 979
• White churches historically functioned as agents upholding racist social structures #exemplifies (0.85) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1055
• Catholic institutions also served slaveholding and colonial white supremacy in America #expands (0.82) — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long, 34
• Legally White Jews, Catholics, and Mormons faced discrimination as an in-between race #complicates (0.75)
• Catholics and Jews were historically racialized as non-White through their religious beliefs. #complicates (0.72)