Editor's note: The African-American community represents a small but vibrant portion of the Catholic population in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. This week, The Tidings begins a four-part series on the experience and impact of African-Americans in the Archdiocese, with a focus on the roots of the community.

Jean Zimmerman Lawrence and her new husband were steeped in Catholic traditions when they arrived in Los Angeles from New Orleans in 1953. While they certainly weren't the Southland's first Black Catholics, they were two among thousands of Black Louisianans that represented the first large migration of Black Catholics - many of them Creoles - seeking work and opportunity in the City of Angels.

And, seeking to escape severe bigotry in their home state. Indeed, recalls Lawrence, the move was a matter of economics, pride and doing what was right.

"Life was segregated from birth to death," she explains. "My husband could not get a job. The company would have jobs available, but when they found out he was a person of color, suddenly no jobs were available. Or they would offer him a job as a janitor, and that was unacceptable."

So they followed the exodus to California where "we heard it was so wonderful we thought you could go and pick up gold in the streets," laughs Lawrence.

Many became parishioners of Holy Name of Jesus Church in South Los Angeles which became known as "Little Corpus Christi," because "that's where all the Creoles went to Mass in New Orleans," says Renette Scott, long-time liturgy director at St. Philomena Church in Carson and a native of New Orleans.

"It was a place of our own," says Scott. "A place where you could hook up with other people from New Orleans and practice your traditions."

Traditions that extended back into the early days of the United States.

New Catholics
As an original French territory, Louisiana has a long history of Catholicism. Generations of African-American Catholics can trace their ancestry back to the two predominantly Catholic territories of Louisiana and Maryland, at a time when much of the growing new country was largely Protestant and Anglo.

Not only was Louisiana Catholic, but - unlike other slave-holding parts of the United States - it was "common practice in Louisiana for Catholic slave-holders to baptize their slaves," notes Sister of Social Service Eva Lumas, whose Creole family migrated to Los Angeles from New Orleans.

Not only were these people baptized but some were educated by Catholics who built and staffed schools.

"It was important to black Catholics that the church built schools to educate blacks because they saw this as a recognition of their intelligence and ability to learn, and a recognition of them as children of God," says Sister Lumas. "This had a tremendous impact, because when you educate someone you acknowledge their humanity, and blacks didn't experience the acknowledgement of their humanity much in Louisiana."

After the abolishment of slavery in the U.S., this legacy of providing educational opportunities for African-Americans was carried on by people like Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament founder Katharine Drexel. It was done in the face of extreme and often violent opposition by southern whites and groups such as the Ku Klux Klan whose tactics included attempting to use the legislature to enact laws preventing the order from serving the African-American community.

Sister Drexel, an heiress from Philadelphia, persevered in devoting her life and fortune to serving the African-American and Native American communities. She went on to open schools in many southern states, culminating with the expansion of New Orleans' Xavier Preparatory School to Xavier University in 1925, the only predominantly African-American Catholic institution of higher education in the United States.

In October 2000 Katharine Drexel was canonized in Rome by Pope John Paul II, making her only the second American-born saint. Her dedicated service to the poor and oppressed have led many to call her the one who launched the Catholic Church in America toward racial integration.

"Her work really counteracted the segregation in the church," says Sister Lumas, who now teaches at the Franciscan School of Theology in Berkeley. "Louisiana black Catholics have a sense of themselves that they are as Catholic as anyone else, and a real sense of pride of Catholic legacy."

Louisiana to Los Angeles
Along with this strong Catholic identity grew a strong commitment to advocacy, service and Catholic education for African-Americans.

Lawrence's grandmother, Marie Lalonier, was one of the four women who directly petitioned Sister Drexel to begin Xavier University. And later her mother, Carmel Lalonier, and aunt, Oblate Sister Mary Martin, (nee Cecile Lalonier), were in Xavier's first graduating class.

The work of the Laloniers, inspired by Sister Drexel's example exemplified "the kind of advocacy that many African-American Xavier graduates have come forward and advocated for African-American Catholics in this diocese, because the history has not been good," says Scott. "They were such committed Catholics and they really worked hard for the church."

This commitment to faith and activism goes hand-in-hand for many Creole Catholics, notes Sister Lumas. With its tight-knit communities and long history of higher education, African-Americans in New Orleans saw themselves as capable and intelligent as anyone, and expected fair and equal treatment. Fighting for equality became a normal occurrence and this commitment to advocacy continued in Los Angeles.

"We were always fighting with the church here to say, 'You must respond to us,'" says Lawrence. "For our generation the ties to the church were part of family culture and so deeply embedded that we stayed, but I'm worried about the next generation."

Next week: "Making our voices heard: Activism and change in the archdiocese."