Lange, Elizabeth Clovis (1784–1882)

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Lange, Elizabeth Clovis (1784–1882)

African-American religious founder. Name variations: Mother Mary Elizabeth Lange; Mother Mary Elizabeth. Born in the French colony of St. Domingue in 1784; died in 1882 in Baltimore, Maryland; daughter of Clovis Lange and Annette ("Dede") Lange; never married.

Immigrated to U.S. (1817); founded school for black Catholic children in Baltimore (1820s); with support of Father James Hector Joubert, founded Oblate Sisters of Providence, the first black Roman Catholic order in the United States (1829); ran schools and supervised teacher training; began the order's first mission school in St. Louis, Missouri (1880s).

Elizabeth Clovis Lange was born in the French colony of Saint Domingue in 1784. Her mother Annette Lange (known as Dede) was the natural daughter of Mardoche Lange, a Jewish plantation owner in Jeremie, Haiti. Her father Clovis had the same family name of Lange. Emigrating to Cuba from Haiti sometime before Toussaint L'Ouverture's Haitian Revolution, the family lived near the city of Santiago, but split up when Dede and Elizabeth Lange left Cuba for the United States in 1817. They landed in Charleston, South Carolina, where they stayed a short time before moving on to Norfolk, Virginia, and finally to Fells Point in Baltimore in the early 1820s. Dede Lange soon returned to the West Indies, but her daughter remained in Baltimore.

Lange's decision to stay in Baltimore was a brave one: she was a black Catholic French-speaking woman living in a Protestant-dominated, slave-holding state. Baltimore did have a French-speaking community, which included refugees from the French Revolution and the French island possessions in the West Indies, many of whom had fled the revolution there. By 1793, the Fells Point area had a sizable Haitian community of about 1,500, of whom approximately 500 were of African ancestry. The nucleus of religious activity for black and white Haitians was St. Mary's Seminary Chapel, run by the Sulpicians, themselves émigrés from revolutionary France. The black congregants met in the segregated "chapelle basse" below the church.

Soon after arriving in Baltimore, with the help of another refugee, Marie Magdalene Balas , Lange opened the first school for the city's French-speaking immigrants. No public education was provided for black children there, and while Maryland—unlike other Southern states—did not legally prohibit the education of blacks, it did not encourage it at all. There were a few small schools for black children operated by Protestant groups, but there was little available for the children of black Catholics.

The school had scant financial support, and Lange was forced to close it in 1827. She turned to the Sulpician fathers for advice, finding support from Father James Hector Joubert. Lange was a devout Catholic, and Father Joubert not only encouraged her in her educational plans, but also in her desire to become a member of a religious order. As existing orders only admitted white women, a new order for black women needed to be established. By giving the order an educational focus, Lange and Joubert hoped to attract women who could learn to teach and run Catholic schools for black children.

Archbishop Whitfield of Baltimore approved the founding of the new religious order, reassuring Lange that white people would not be offended to see black women in religious habits. Lange, Balas and Rosine Boegue began their novitiate on June 13, 1828, preparing for their religious vows. The three women established a school for black children in a rented house near the Sulpician Seminary, supported by money raised from members of the black community and the white Haitian community. The school moved to larger premises on Richmond Street later that year.

On July 2, 1829, in the house on Richmond Street, the first black Roman Catholic order in the United States was instituted, the Oblate Sisters of Providence. The first four members were Mother Mary Elizabeth, as Lange was now known, and Sisters Marie Francis, Mary Rose, and Mary Theresa (a former pupil, Almeide Duchemin Maxis ). As well as making history with her new religious order, Lange was an educational pioneer with her school and teacher training facility, the first of its kind for black women in Baltimore. She was to become a dynamic, resourceful and influential figure in Baltimore's educational circles for the greater part of the 19th century.

The school on Richmond Street soon moved to Pennsylvania Avenue and became the Saint Frances Academy. Its annual examinations were overseen by faculty members from St. Mary's College and later by the Jesuits of Loyola College. Students competed for medals and awards and took part in concerts, recitals and choirs. The school was predominantly vocational, with sewing and other domestic arts on the curriculum, in addition to religious instruction. As well as running the school, the sisters began taking in widows and indigent elderly women unable to support themselves.

During the cholera epidemic of 1832, Lange and 11 of the Oblate Sisters volunteered to help minister to the sick in the almshouse, responding to an appeal for nurses. Unlike the Sisters of Charity, a white nursing order, the Oblates were never publicly recognized for this work.

In the 1840s, after Joubert's death, the convent experienced a financial downturn and the archbishop of Baltimore, seeing the poverty of the sisters, ordered them to disband. Lange refused, and the sisters took in washing and ironing, and worked outside the convent as domestics, in order to maintain the order.

Lange's fears that people might be shocked at the sight of a black woman in a religious habit were not unfounded. Some ridiculed the sisters or physically threatened them: in the 1860s, sisters teaching in Philadelphia were repeatedly forced from the sidewalks. There were also forces at large in the Catholic Church that were opposed to a black religious order, at a time when some theologians believed that black people had no souls. However, Lange's devotion to her church, and her service to the educationally deprived, won her the approbation of Pope Gregory XVI.

As well as running her educational order, Lange also took part in community outreach programs. During the Civil War, she became local superior of St. Benedict's school in Baltimore and subsequently organized the establishment of other schools in Baltimore, Philadelphia and New Orleans. In her final years, still dynamic, she began the order's first mission school in St. Louis, Missouri. By the time of Lange's death in 1882, the Oblate order was established in the United States, the Caribbean, and Central America. More than 100 years after her death, there are attempts to make her the first African-American female to be canonized by the Roman Catholic Church.