One True Church

“A meticulous account the growth of an interracial Catholic community in Newton Grove, N.C., from the 1870s through the segregation era and beyond. . . . Historians of American Catholicism will want this on their bookshelves.”—Publishers Weekly

“Susan Ridgely has provided an exceedingly engaging and thoughtful analysis that reframes and examines the nuances of many aspects of Southern history with wide-ranging implications for the study of interracial communities in American religious history.”—Julius H. Bailey, author of Down in the Valley: An Introduction to African American Religious History

“An astonishing story of 'racial and religious renegades' that reframes US civil rights history and reveals the possibilities of interracial community-making past and present. Beautifully written and richly detailed, it is a love letter to rural North Carolina.”—Julie Byrne, author of The Other Catholics

“I fell in love with Susan Ridgely’s One True Church . It is an extraordinary historical study of faith, race, and family in America, and one that speaks to us today.”—David Cecelski, author of The Fire of Freedom: Abraham Galloway and the Slaves' Civil War

“This study is at once a fascinating local history of a small but extraordinary Catholic community in Newton Grove, North Carolina, and a case study of how global currents shaped a single parish.”—John T. McGreevy, University of Notre Dame

“A much larger story about racial discrimination in the Jim Crow South . . . Ridgely uncovers a history drawn from living memory, drawing it much closer to our own lived experience.” —Gerardo Marti, author of Worship Across the Racial Divide: Religious Music and the Multiracial Congregation

One True Church is a master class in how to research and write about the complex histories of race and religion in America. Ridgely deftly foregrounds the voices of her interviewees and offers her readers a beautifully rendered microhistory of Black and white Catholicism in rural North Carolina. This is a story of the human need to build and maintain communities of purpose and belonging; it is a testament to the dignity of everyday women and men. This book will stay with me for a very long time.—Kristy Nabhan-Warren, University of Iowa.