Editor's Note
Newton Grove: Another Story Line
This month’s cover story on the beginnings of the Catholic community in Newton Grove touches on only one chapter in that parish’s very rich history. Here’s another. It’s ironic: As you’ll read in the feature, Dr. John Carr Monk first became a spiritual seeker because of the division in his Methodist church over race. According to a history of the Monk family by Charles H. Bowman, Jr., the Goshen Methodist Church “was a mixed congregation; before the Civil War the slaves went to church with their masters, occupied the galleries, and often minded the restless white children.
“Now the former slave owners felt that the freed Negroes should provide their own church, and the only dissenting voice was that of Dr. Monk. He argued that the blacks had no educated ministry and suggested that the congregation withhold its decision for a few years. Popular opinion prevailed, however. The eviction of the Negroes affected the physician to the point that, with the help of his brother Rufus Monk, he built a Sunday school for the blacks and taught them himself.”
In 1939, in honor of the Redemptorist Order which had administered St. Mark’s in Newton Grove (the parish Monk founded) since 1928, the name of the church was changed to Holy Redeemer. The parish had long had schools for blacks and whites, separate of course, and in that same year it was deemed time for the “colored” to have their own church. So the parish hall, constructed with funds from Mother (now Saint) Katherine Drexel “to be used as a place of instruction for Colored People” was turned into a church and named St. Benedict.
Enter Bishop Vincent S. Waters, installed in Raleigh in 1945. Waters was an early and vigorous opponent of segregation, and in 1953 he came personally to Holy Redeemer (at serious personal risk) and closed St. Benedict, preaching a fiery sermon and ordering the Catholics in Newton Grove to worship together. The event put Bishop Waters, and Newton Grove, on the national stage, although the result, as in later mergers ordered by the Bishop, was a loss of many of the black Catholics who had preferred their own communities. It was immediately after the “Newton Grove Affair” that the name of the church there was changed once again, to Our Lady of Guadalupe.
Thanks as always for your letters. You can write me at 715 Nazareth Street, Raleigh, NC 27606 or reece@raldioc.org.