In northern cities, Catholics from “white ethnic” neighborhoods were often the most visible opponents of racial integration in the 1960s and ’70s. But, as historian Karen Joy Johnson writes, there was also a distinct strain of activity by white Catholics—inspired by and in cooperation with their Black peers—that contributed to the Civil Rights movement.

From the beginnings of the Great Migration, Johnson writes, most Catholic parishes, like residential neighborhoods and public schools, were strictly divided by race. Formal organization against this state of affairs by Black Catholics began in the 1910s with Thomas Wyatt Turner’s formation of the Federated Colored Catholics (FCC). In the 1930s—against Turner’s wishes—the group’s approach shifted from organizing Black lay Catholics for protest to the formation of interracial partnerships.

Black Chicago physician Arthur Falls was particularly influential in this effort. Falls and his peers found a willing audience in an emerging group of young white Catholics whose sensibilities were formed by the increasingly influential Mystical Body of Christ doctrine. This held that Catholics of all races should be treated as Christ himself and that lay Catholics must act in service of their values rather than simply following the leadership of the clergy.

Among the institutions influenced by the doctrine was the Catholic Worker. Johnson writes that Falls founded a Chicago branch of the organization in 1936 that attracted radical white Catholics. He also convinced the organization’s cofounder, Dorothy Day, to change the masthead of the Catholic Worker, the organization’s newspaper, from two white workers to an interracial pair.

But, while both the Catholic Worker and many of the most prominent anti-racist organizations of the 1930s had links to communism, Catholic interracialists positioned themselves as an alternative to secular leftism. Catherine de Huek, a Russian immigrant whose family members had been killed by the Red Army, told her audiences to imagine God judging them for failing to clothe and feed him when he “was a Negro and you were a white American Catholic.”

Johnson writes that Huek and other Catholic interracialists, Black and white, put a great deal of energy into Friendship Houses. These functioned both as settlement houses, providing resources to working-class people in their neighborhoods, and as gathering spots where middle-class Black and white people socialized together. In 1964, 115,000 people from 119 American cities participated in a national home visit day where Black Catholic families invited white visitors into their homes.

While some prominent Catholic clergy sided with the interracialists from the start, it was only in 1958 that the hierarchy of American bishops made an official statement opposing discrimination. It still failed to acknowledge the Church’s culpability or include steps for action, but it did help Catholic interracialists reach more white Catholics with their message.

As mass Civil Rights protests shook the country, white Catholics had a significant presence in the movement. For example, a reported 10,000 white Catholics took part in the 1963 March on Washington.

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