NOTE: Enjoy this excerpt from The American Daily Reader, by CatholicVote president Brian Burch and Emily Stimpson Chapman. To order the complete volume, visit the CatholicVote store today!
When the first edition of the American Catholic Tribune went to press in 1886, it announced: We will do what no other paper published by colored men has dared to do—-give the great Catholic Church a hearing and show that it is worthy of at least a fair consideration at the hands of our race, being as it is the only place on this Continent where rich and poor, white and black, must drop prejudice at the threshold and go hand in hand to the altar.
The brainchild of Daniel Rudd, a former slave then living in Ohio, the American Catholic Tribune condemned segregation, supported civil rights, and called on black Catholics to be like “leaven” among their race by bringing more blacks into the Church.
Rudd himself was born into slavery 32 years earlier, on August 7, 1854, in Bardstown, Kentucky. He was baptized Catholic as a baby and attended Mass with his parents in the same church where his owners worshipped. In that church—St. Joseph’s—Rudd experienced his first taste of racial harmony.
Convinced that the Catholic Church was the answer to America’s race problem, Rudd moved to the North after the Civil War to complete his education. He then started a successful business and launched his newspaper to form, encourage, and evangelize African Americans.
Three years after the newspaper’s launch, Rudd organized the first National Black Catholic Congress in Washington, D.C. Prominent black Catholics, including Father Augustine Tolton, came from across the country to discuss pressing problems of education and evangelization. They also met with President Grover Cleveland, who invited them to the White House.
Rudd would host four more such gatherings before his newspaper folded in 1897 and he returned to the South. In Arkansas, he worked as a businessman and civil rights leader until his health failed in 1932. He died in Bardstown a year later.
In the late 1980s, the National Black Catholic Congress re-formed. Today, it has a nationwide membership committed to carrying on Rudd’s original mission.
