Sr. Clotilde a woman for our times

Sister Clotilde forged a firm path in the first half of the
20th century. She is remembered for her commitment to
 Christ and to the students she taught. (Photo credit:
Sisters of Saint Joseph, St. Augustine - July 2017 archive)

Finding online archival information on religious sisters who served in pioneer Florida can be challenging. So when resources readily popped up about Sister Anna Clotilde Kohler, SSJ, I took it as a sign from above. I even found two photos of her.

Granted, Sr. Clotilde, as she was known, died in modern times - 1962. She was in her 80s. But she'd spent 65 years as a Sister of St. Joseph in Florida. She dedicated almost 50 of those years to educating African-American children in Ybor City and Fernandina. Segregation was the law for all of those years. Anti-Catholicism was pretty strong for most of the era, too.

But politics and bigotry don't surface in the records I found about Sr. Clotilde. Instead, I learned of her religiosity, steadfastness, and strong personality. The expression on her face in the SSJ photo, shown with this post, speaks of an individuality that religious orders of the time tried to squash. Strength is also seen in an Amelia Island Museum of History photo of her in the 1950s, when she was in Fernandina.

Could a strong will and individualism be why Sr. Clotilde kept being reassigned during her early years? We'll never know. That isn't in the public record. But there are hints that this woman forged her own way when possible.

Sr. Clotilde was born in St. Augustine and donned her religious habit in 1896. That's when she took the name Anna Clotilde. Her birth name was Mary Elizabeth, according to the Sisters of Saint Joseph in St. Augustine. (Click on the SSJ's July 2017 newsletter archive to see where I found that detail and the photo.) In 1901, she landed in Ybor City. That was after she'd already had seven assignments! She soon moved on, again. In 1903, she was sent to St. Benedict the Moor parish school. And there she stayed for more than 40 years.

Michael J. McNally, author of Catholic Parish Life on Florida's West Coast, 1860-1968, cites Sr. Clotilde as "one of the most outstanding mentors of St. Benedict School..." (page 192). He also says she was remembered more for her "commitment to Christ and her students" than for her teaching abilities (192). The SSJ archive, however, says she was known for her teaching. Another source calls her an admired teacher and "a stabilizing influence in the black community" (Jane Quinn, "Nuns in Ybor City: The Sisters of St. Joseph and the Immigrant Community," Tampa Bay History, Spring/Summer 1983).

The sources agree on examples of her dedication. She:

• every fourth Sunday, led students in a song-filled procession to special pews in church for an integrated Mass
• formed a St. Joseph Society (boys) and St. Cecilia Society (girls) to help youth grow in Catholic piety
• built a stage for students and helped them perform dramatic and musical events

Quinn's article says Sr. Clotilde maintained correspondence with many former pupils after she was transferred to St. Peter Claver School in Fernandina. It'd be great to read some of those letters, for they surely reveal more of her personality and shed light on what made her special enough for multiple remembrances. 

McNally, on page 193, posits that her humanity grew from suffering she went through. He writes that, early in her religious life, she was accused of having "a particular friendship." In Catholic religious life, that is a code phrase for a same-sex relationship or attraction. It was a serious accusation and resulted in her being hauled before the bishop. After the bishop heard St. Clotilde's side of the story, he deemed the accusation false.

"This experience of being unjustly accused deepened her human compassion and spiritual life, as she herself later admitted," McNally writes. Along with Sr. Clotilde's letters, I'd like to read any other writings she left behind - especially the memoir the SSJ archive mentions. As McNally says, Sr. Clotilde "had a certain independence of character which many admired" (193).  She was also moral, dedicated to others, and committed to Christ. The kind of leader we are so in need of today.

Hardly perfect

Detail of the cover of the 2006 El Scribano.

I didn't want to write this post. So I delayed, and delayed, and procrastinated some more.

Why? Because I like to write about the strengths of the pioneer Catholic community in Florida. Not its weaknesses.

But the Holy Spirit prodded me to post. Humans are flawed. Amid the many people trying to do right in pioneer Florida, some did wrong. Possibly, they didn't realize it. One can hope. But just as we stumble along on our paths today, so did the Catholics establishing a foothold for the faith in Florida. They, like us, hopefully realize(d) faults and make/made amends.

In this case, the positive is that the Church and its representatives in Florida educated children of color in an era when it wasn't popular and when laws made it difficult. The negative is that within that educational system, some people engaged in racist behavior. 

That truth emerged from recollections written by a former pupil of St. Benedict the Moor Catholic School in St. Augustine. They are published in the 2006 issue of El Scribano, the St. Augustine Journal of History.

I wrote about the St. Benedict the Moor school in this blog in March 2017. I particularly noted how three religious sisters were jailed in 1916 because they were white women teaching children of color. The memoir in El Scribano focuses on a slightly later time period -- the late 1920s and early 1930s. The article's author, Barbara Vickers, was born in 1923 and attended St. Benedict school from kindergarten through eighth grade.

The overall article is about family and neighborhood life in the St. Augustine community of Lincolnville, with school a part of it. Some elements are familiar to Catholic schoolchildren everywhere and in every era: "The sisters stressed catechism, multiplication tables, and literature, and they were very stern." I remember as much from my years of Catholic school.

Other aspects, however, were worlds apart. Listen to what else Vickers writes: "Items discarded from the white Catholic school, St. Joseph's Academy, were considered good enough for black children." That included desks and schoolbooks, which were about three years behind, "but sold to black students nonetheless."

Part of me rises to defend those early religious sisters. I imagine their funds were severely restricted. Vickers writes how the sisters would varnish the old desks before sending them to St. Benedict's. But there's no excusing some things. Vickers remembers that only light-skinned children of color were chosen to crown a statue of the Blessed Mother each May. And that a choir teacher, a Sister St. Matthew, told Vickers that "all colored people can sing," when the young pupil tried to explain that she couldn't carry a tune.

Vickers doesn't write with bitterness. She includes details about happy times, in fact, the memoir is more positive than negative. She tells how everyone in the community crowded into the school yard to decorate floats for the Emancipation Day parade each year. And she remembers that: "It was always a pleasure to attend the nine o'clock mass at St. Benedict's and see the sunlight coming in from my favorite stained glass window..."  Her grandmother and great-aunts had donated the window in memory of their mother. 

In its contributor notes, El Scribano lists Vickers as having been a "vocal leader in the town's civil rights movement." I don't know if she is still alive, but I thank her for penning her remembrances of school years. I like to think at least some of the sisters were free of prejudice, but I have to accept that some weren't. As with all history, we have to know of past wrongs in order to learn from them.

School site echoes vibrant past

Does this building still stand? This is
 a 2011 image of St. Benedict the Moor
School. (Credit: Google Street View)

Second of two parts

Six years is a long time in our age of instant communications. The turn-of-the-20th-century building at the core of today's post might not exist anymore. I can't find photos of St. Benedict the Moor School newer than a 2011 Google Street View, pictured first in this post. That's an ominous sign, for the school's history is rich. The physical remainder, as you can see, is in dire shape.

Built in 1898, St. Benedict school was "one of the first all-black Catholic schools in Florida," according to a 2014 article in the St. Augustine Record. The St. Benedict parish in St. Augustine's Lincolnville neighborhood was founded in the 1870s, during Reconstruction. St. Benedict's Church was built in the early 1900s. It's been restored and appears vibrant again. 

A few web resources linked in this post document the church and school history. As always, for me, the social history leaps out. Such as the time three Catholic nuns were arrested in 1916 because they were white women teaching black schoolchildren. Jim Crow laws forbade such interaction during segregation years in Florida (and probably in other states).

As a Catholic-owned educational institution, St. Benedict's was a private school. A judge ruled the law didn't apply to private schools, and the nuns were released. Their names deserve mention, though: Sisters Mary Thomasine, Scholastica and Beningus, according to the St. Augustine Record article. That news story also notes the arrests occurred on an Easter Sunday.

St. Benedict's students ride in a school float decorated
for an Emancipation Day parade in the 1920s.
(Credit: State Archives of Florida/Twine)

The information about the nuns is listed in various websites and on a historical marker erected on the grounds of the church complex. Photos of the marker are below.

Lesser known are the photos by African-American Richard Twine, a photographer who's the subject of Part One of this post. He photographed St. Benedict class pictures, church gatherings and even the school's float in an Emancipation  Day parade in the 1920s. The images bring to life the human side of one of the decades when St. Benedict School thrived. The Twine collection may be viewed on the Florida Memory website.

The school closed in the 1960s, some 70 years after it was built with money from philanthropist and Catholic nun St. Katharine Drexel. Restoration efforts started, but stalled. In 2004, the school was considered one of St. Augustine's most threatened historic places. I wonder if restoration remains a goal. I sure hope so.

Credit: These closeup views of the
Black Catholic Heritage historical marker
 are from a gallery on waymarking.com