In 1962, a cohort of Black children desegregated Catholic schools in New Orleans. Since then, retellings that center the good intentions of Catholic leaders have overtaken historical reality, unjustly crediting Church leadership with the vision, motivation, and actions that led to desegregation. After watching the story of Catholic school integration become softened and sanitized over the years, Terri A. Dickerson, a member of that first cohort, began to collect stories from her peers that revealed a different story: Black Catholics exercised considerable agency in pursuing their rights, and children like Dickerson experienced torment and harassment in the transition from segregation to integration. Children at the Gates centers the Black families, and specifically the young students, whose bravery ended the segregated educational system. By restoring the voices of the children themselves, Dickerson shifts the history of Catholic desegregation away from institutional leaders and toward the young people whose courage and determination made change possible.
Despite segregation's inconsistency with Catholic doctrine, Catholic leaders in the United States developed and maintained segregated churches, hospitals, schools, and other institutions for generations. Because Catholic schools were private rather than public institutions, Church leaders were under no legal obligation to wait for Brown v. Board of Education before ending segregation. Instead, they continued to enforce segregationist policies while grasping for quasi-theological explanations to justify them.
For decades, Catholic institutions had employed an array of tactics aimed at having it both ways, publicly condemning racial discrimination while continuing to operate and defend segregated institutions that Church leaders had both the authority and freedom to integrate. In particular, Dickerson argues that Archbishop Joseph Rummel, leader of the Catholic Church in New Orleans, downplayed his own power and yielded to intolerant church members who preferred racial separation. Drawing on years of archival research and original oral history interviews, Children at the Gates provides a needed corrective to the historical record, telling the story of the desegregation of Catholic schools in New Orleans through the eyes and voices of the Black children who lived it.
