Williams: The Rev. Mr. Charles Williams Jr., a pillar of renewed faith, helped erect a monument to the faith and perseverance of Black Catholics in Richmond | History

When the Catholic Diocese of Richmond closed St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in 1969, the teenage Charles Williams was done with Catholicism.

The diocese had opened St. Joseph’s in 1885 to serve the area’s Black Catholics. But the still-solvent church in Jackson Ward would be shuttered to promote integration. 

”He went off to Howard University and stayed away, extremely angry at the church,” his wife, Marie Williams, recalled Thursday. “He thought it was the most racist act he had ever encountered to close a Black parish and expect Black people to go to a white church.”

“He was mad at God and he was mad at the church.”

But in March 1994, his father was murdered. And a few weeks later, my brother invited Williams, his buddy, to attend the first communion of his son at St. Paul’s Catholic Church, a Northside congregation where many former St. Joseph’s members had landed.

It was a homecoming he never saw coming.

Years later, Williams would describe the occasion in his spiritual autobiography: 

“When I entered St. Paul’s that Sunday, it was the first time I had attended Mass in 25 years. That day, God has his way with me. The Holy Spirit opened me up like a bucket and poured all those memories of St. Joseph’s back into me. I left church that Sunday promising the Lord that I was back and would never stray again.”

And thus began the Dominion retiree’s journey from active congregant to living and working at Richmond Hill, an ecumenical retreat center. In 2013, he would be ordained as a deacon, ministering to the incarcerated and working on behalf of racial and social justice. Five years later, he would be named director of the diocese’s Office of Black Catholics. 

There, he collaborated with the Rev. Mr. John T. Tucker III, a fellow deacon, on a statue reflecting the challenges of Black Catholics cast adrift from their home church only to land at an unwelcoming space.  That statue, of St. Joseph and the child Jesus, was dedicated at St. Paul’s on March 19. 

Sadly, the Rev. Mr. Charles Williams Jr. was not there to bask in the occasion. He died on January 27 after a battle with cancer. He was 70.

Punctuating the moment with additional sadness was the Feb. 25 death of Herman William Bates Sr., 93, a former St. Joseph’s member and longtime St. Paul’s usher whose warm greeting at my nephew’s first communion opened Williams’ heart and helped restore his faith. 

The statue honors the former St. Joseph’s parishioners for “their dedication to their faith and their perseverance and courage in the face of racial inequity.” 

For sure, the integration of the diocese was not seamless during the racially tumultuous era of the late 1960s and early ’70s.

My family had left St. Joseph’s several years before its closing. But even as a child, the path forward felt rocky. After a brief stint at Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, we arrived at St. Paul’s, where racial tensions and an atmosphere of unwelcome were palpable, not least of all during the limp handshakes – or ignored extended hand – during the “sign of peace” ritual of Mass. 

“When the St. Joseph’s folks came over to Saint Paul, some of the then-parishioners of Saint Paul didn’t like that and they left,” Tucker said Thursday. But of those who stayed, “I like to say Saint Paul is a community where people of both races have made the decision that, ‘I’m going to be Catholic and I’m going to worship here.'”

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. famously called 11 a.m. on Sunday one of the most segregated hours in America. But St. Paul’s, after a shaky start as an integrated congregation, now belies that indictment. The church is now 35% African American. Tucker and Williams embodied this greater unity as friends who would regularly meet for lunch on Monday’s at Dot’s Back Inn.

The deacons were in the midst of planning to co-teach a class on faith and race when they came up with the statue idea. Under the auspices of the office for Black Catholics, they secured a grant from the Daniel Rudd Fund of the National Black Catholic Congress, partially funding the statue by Dixon Studio of Staunton.

The class started four weeks ago, with Tucker and Cheryl Curbeam of St. Elizabeth’s Catholic Church co-teaching a course exploring how their Catholic faith can work toward racial reconciliation.  

“Like the Confederate statues coming down symbolized something, this statue going up symbolized something,” Marie Williams said. 

The new statue, and her husband’s journey, show that past isn’t necessarily prologue, if we have the faith, perseverance and spirit to create change.