One True Church: An American Story of Race, Family, and Religion

In the summer of 1872, a white doctor and a formerly enslaved African American farmer walked through a field near Newton Grove, North Carolina, and mapped out the dimensions of a new clapboard church. The men, John Carr Monk and Solomon Monk, had been raised together on a nearby plantation. While neighbors attended newly segregated Protestant congregations, the Monks converted to Catholicism, which offered a framework of racial universalism. Alongside the church, the parish ran parochial sc...