Before Vatican II, before the race riots of the 1940s, the white Jesuit priest John LaFarge decried America's treatment of blacks. A man ahead of his church on the race issue who nevertheless did not press hard enough in ridding it of an institutional bias against African Americans is the portrait David W. Southern paints in the first scholarly biography of LaFarge.
According to Southern, LaFarge was the foremost Catholic spokesman on black-white relations in America for more than thirty years. In a series of books and articles -- he served on the staff of the influential Jesuit weekly...
Before Vatican II, before the race riots of the 1940s, the white Jesuit priest John LaFarge decried America's treatment of blacks. A man ahead of h...
