Augustus Tolton was born a slave in 1854 in Missouri, where he was baptized a Catholic. In the Civil War, he fled to the free state of Illinois.
As a teenager there, Tolton believed he had been called to become a priest. But in Jemar Tisby's important new book, The Color of Compromise: The Truth About the American Church's Complicity in Racism, Tisby, president of The Witness, a black Christian collective, writes that "no Catholic seminary in the country would accept a black student."
That racist policy forced Tolton to work for 10 years to acquire enough money to attend seminary in Rome. Eventually, in 1886, Tolton became what Tisby calls "the first person of known African descent to become a Roman Catholic priest in the United States," serving mostly in Chicago.
