NEWPORT, R.I. (Oct. 3, 2016) – A new book by Dr. Timothy B. Neary, associate professor of history and coordinator of American studies at Salve Regina University, challenges many of our widely accepted understandings about U.S. race relations in northern cities during the mid-20th century.
“Crossing Parish Boundaries: Race, Sports, and Catholic Youth in Chicago, 1914-1954” (University of Chicago Press, Oct. 17, 2016), builds upon and complicates John T. McGreevy’s groundbreaking scholarship two decades ago on the subject of the Catholic encounter with race in the 20th century urban north.
Controversy erupted in spring 2001 when Chicago’s mostly white Southside Catholic Conference youth sports league rejected the application of the predominantly black St. Sabina grade school. Fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, inter-racialism seemed stubbornly unattainable, and the national spotlight once again turned to the history of racial conflict in Catholic parishes. It’s widely understood that midcentury, working-class, white ethnic Catholics were among the most virulent racists, but, as “Crossing Parish Boundaries” shows, that’s not the whole story.