Teaching in Black and White: The Sisters of St. Joseph in the American South by Barbara E. Mattick

Reviewed by: Teaching in Black and White: The Sisters of St. Joseph in the American South by Barbara E. Mattick James M. Woods Teaching in Black and White: The Sisters of St. Joseph in the American South. By Barbara E. Mattick. Washington, DC: Catholic University of Press, 2022, 275pp. $34.95. Barbara Mattick, a woman with a background in public history, has produced a welcome contribution on women religious orders and their impact on black and white pupils, patients, and orphans in the American South. My history of the Catholic Church in the American South from 1513–1900 did not deal directly with this topic and so this book is needed. This work starts when the Sisters of St. Joseph from France arrived in the mainly Catholic community of St. Augustine in 1866 until they affiliated with another order of women religious in 1922. [End Page 98] Her book follows no overall narrative but covers different aspects of their history. The first chapter covers the Irish Sisters of Mercy who came to Florida’s oldest city in 1859 and stayed a decade. The next chapter deals with the coming of the French Sisters of St. Joseph in 1886 and follows their ministry for the next quarter century to white and black students. The third chapter is on the intense religious rivalry between the Catholic sisters and the female Protestant missionary associations for the souls of “black folk” in Florida. The next chapter covers the sisters and their ministry during the Yellow Fever epidemics of 1877, 1888. The next two chapters deal with personnel and provincial changes, including the awkward situation when the sisters were ordered in late 1899 to sever their relationship with the motherhouse in France. The penultimate chapter is on anti-Catholicism and racism in early twentieth century Florida. The final chapter covers the Sisters of St. Joseph in Savannah, Washington, and Augusta until the early 1920s. The book draws upon a rich array of primary sources especially the hundreds of letters in French to the motherhouse in Le Puy, France. Such correspondence provide a rare look at these remarkable women “and their inner thoughts, struggles and hopes and even their sense of humor” (xiv). The work is augmented with pictures of the sisters and their ministry with white and black students in Florida and Georgia. This reviewer found it pleasing that the footnotes were located the bottom of the page. This book highlights areas of nineteenth century religion often overlooked; for example, ecumenism. As Mattick observes, “salvation was only possible through the Roman Catholic Church; Protestants were heretics . . . . The Protestant Missionaries . . . just as adamantly considered Roman Catholics to be lost souls” (82). When in 1913 a Florida bill passed forbidding whites from teaching in black schools, public or private, three sisters of St. Joseph were arrested on April 24, 1916, for violating this law. Two sisters were bonded out but Sister Thomasine Hehir refused and was put back into the convent for running a black Catholic school in St. Augustine. On May 21 a local judge [End Page 99] ordered her released as the law did not apply to private schools. While this was an interesting event, Mattick has three locations for this St. Benedict the Moor school. She once listed it near St. Augustine in Lincolnville, a picture of Sister Thomasine has the school in 1916 as being in St. Augustine, and another locates the school in Ybor City (185, 186, 249). This caveat aside, the Sisters of St. Joseph founded the “first recognized convent school in Florida, the first Roman Catholic white order to minister for freedmen after the Civil War, and the first Catholic orphanage in Florida” (235). Even after the religious order transferred its affiliation after 1922, it continued to minister with black and white students for decades later. With this book being published, it is hoped that their legacy will not be ignored or overlooked. [End Page 100] James M. Woods Georgia Southern University Copyright © 2023 American Catholic Historical Society

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