This book expands and complicates the history of race relations in northern cities by analyzing the little-known and largely forgotten story of Catholic interracialism prior to the modern civil rights movement. Bishop Bernard Sheil created the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) in 1930 as a Catholic version of muscular Christianity, using the glamour of sports to attract thousands of boys and girls from neighborhoods throughout Chicago. A nationally-known figure by the mid-1930s, the cosmopolitan Sheil was the antithesis of Father Charles Coughlin, Detroit’s anti-Semitic radio priest. Catholic ... More

This book expands and complicates the history of race relations in northern cities by analyzing the little-known and largely forgotten story of Catholic interracialism prior to the modern civil rights movement. Bishop Bernard Sheil created the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) in 1930 as a Catholic version of muscular Christianity, using the glamour of sports to attract thousands of boys and girls from neighborhoods throughout Chicago. A nationally-known figure by the mid-1930s, the cosmopolitan Sheil was the antithesis of Father Charles Coughlin, Detroit’s anti-Semitic radio priest. Catholic social teaching and New Deal urban pluralism provided the ideological rationale for the CYO, which from its inception welcomed African Americans. Paradoxically, the CYO was organized around the parish—often a bulwark of ethnic identity in the urban North. Roman Catholic tradition regarded each parish as an equal part of one citywide community. CYO participants from Chicago’s Bronzeville, therefore, competed as equals with young people from white ethnic parishes. Interviews with African Americans who took part in the CYO reveal that their participation often resulted in interracial experiences that created opportunities for greater involvement in Chicago’s business community and civic culture heavily influenced by Irish Catholics in the mid-twentieth century. John McGreevy and other scholars of urban history have focused on conflicts between white Catholics and African Americans over neighborhood turf, particularly in the postwar period. Crossing Parish Boundaries, however, reveals a countervailing tradition of Catholic interracial cooperation during the Great Depression and World War II, while arguing it is a model worth reexamining.