Southwestern Historical Quarterly

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In 1961, Father Sherrill Smith, the assistant pastor of St. Joseph Church in the city of San Antonio, became the first Catholic priest based in the South to participate in a direct-action civil rights protest when he joined the stand-ins at San Antonio's Majestic Theater, which confined African American customers to an upstairs balcony. For Smith, the denial of civil rights to African Americans was a "moral and religious" issue he felt compelled to address when the movement called for assistance.¹

Four years later, Smith was one of hundreds of mainly White clergy and laity from many denominations who responded to Martin Luther King Jr.'s appeal for their participation in the demonstrations at Selma, Alabama, for African American voting rights. The Selma protests marked the first time that a large number of Catholic priests and sisters had joined a direct-action civil rights protest in the South, where Catholic dioceses struggled with varying degrees of commitment and success to overturn decades of segregation in their institutions. Only a handful of the more than 250 sisters and Catholic clergy who marched in Selma were based in the South. Smith was only one of thirty-six White people, and one of only two Catholic priests, whom civil rights organizers permitted to walk the entire fifty-four-mile route of the Selma-to-Montgomery march that marked the climax of the Alabama protests. His experience in Selma made Smith more militant and outspoken. In 1966, he helped mediate during James [End Page 301] Meredith's March against Fear in Mississippi, and he endorsed the idea of Black Power.²

Father Smith's fight against racial injustice was not confined solely to discrimination against African Americans in the Deep South, however. In addition to opposing discrimination against African Americans, he supported the Mexican American civil rights movement. The same sense of morality that took him to the Majestic Theater, Selma, and Mississippi had earlier impelled him to support a Hispanic labor protest in the late 1950s and also informed his subsequent labor activism in the second half of the 1960s and the early 1970s. As the first Catholic priest to participate in labor and civil rights direct action in Texas and the South, Smith was an important part of a wider, yet underestimated, Catholic contribution to civil rights and labor struggles in the South.³

Smith's labor and civil rights activism in the 1950s and 1960s has not received sufficient attention from scholars of Catholicism, civil rights, or Texas history. Smith does not appear in Martin Herman Kuhlman's dissertation on desegregation in Texas. Robert A. Goldberg's study of racial change in San Antonio between 1960 and 1965 only mentions Smith briefly. Saul E. Bronder's biography of Archbishop Robert E. Lucey, who initially supported Smith but clashed with him in later years, discusses Smith's deteriorating relationship with his superior. More recently, Brian D. Behnken's account of the civil rights struggle in Texas acknowledges some of Smith's activism but considers him chiefly regarding Project Equality, an interdenominational program that sought to promote nondiscriminatory hiring by businesses and the Church. Max Krochmal's study of multiracial coalition building in civil rights era Texas mentions Smith briefly on three occasions. Smith contributed to both labor and civil rights struggles, but as an Anglo and a priest who saw his role mostly as supporting these struggles when called upon by those involved.⁴ [End Page 302]

Some scholars, such as Amy L. Koehlinger and John T. McGreevy, have stressed the importance of the Second Vatican Council in encouraging Catholic participation in the civil rights movement. The council, which met in Rome between 1962 and 1965, emphasized the duty of the Church to engage with the problems of...