Desegregating Dixie: The Catholic Church in the South and Desegregation, 1945-1992

Winner of the 2020 American Studies Network Book Prize from the European Association for American Studies

Mark Newman draws on a vast range of archives and many interviews to uncover for the first time the complex response of African American and white Catholics across the South to desegregation. In the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, the southern Catholic Church contributed to segregation by confining African Americans to the back of white churches and to black-only...