James Augustine Healy (April 6, 1830 – August 5, 1900) was an American prelate of the Catholic Church. He was the first known African American to serve as a Catholic priest or bishop. With his predominantly European ancestry, Healy passed for a white man and identified as such.
Born into slavery in the Healy family of Georgia, James Healy was the son of a White plantation owner and a mixed-race enslaved woman. He was later freed, educated overseas, and ordained a priest in 1854. He served as Bishop of Portland in Maine from 1875 until his death in 1900.
Biography
Family
James Healy was born in Jones County, Georgia, on April 6, 1830. His father, Michael Morris Healy (1796–1850), was a native of County Roscommon, Ireland who became a wealthy cotton planter after settling in Georgia. Healy owned more than 1,500 acres of land near the Ocmulgee River as well as 49 to 60 enslaved people. James's mother was a mixed-race enslaved woman named Mary Eliza (c. 1813–1850), whom Michael had purchased for $3,700 along with her family. He took Mary Eliza as his common-law wife in 1829.
James was the eldest of their ten children. His siblings were:
Hugh Clark Healy (1832–1853) Patrick Francis Healy (1834–1910), the first African American Jesuit and president of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Alexander Sherwood Healy (1836–1875), a priest and rector of the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston Martha Ann Healy (1838–1920) Michael Augustine Healy (1839–1904), a captain in the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service and the first African American to command a ship of the U.S. government Eugene Healy (1842), who died in infancy Amanda Josephine Healy (1845–1879), a member of the Religious Hospitallers of St. Joseph Eliza Dunamore Healy (1846–1919), a member of the Congregation of Notre Dame of Montreal and the first African American abbess Eugene Healy (1849–1914)
In his will, Michael Healy referred to his wife as "my trusty woman, Eliza, mother of my...children." Due to the partus sequitur ventrem principle in slave law, children inherited the legal status of their mothers; therefore, the Healy children were born into slavery. Michael was unable to directly free his wife and children as manumission required an act of the Georgia General Assembly in exceptional circumstances. Before their deaths a few months apart in 1850, Michael and Eliza Healy had planned to relocate with their youngest children to a northern state that prohibited slavery.
Racial identity
Due to their largely European ancestry, the Healy children were light-skinned enough to pass for White and they did not publicize their Black heritage. James and his siblings were recorded as White in official documents, such as census records and death certificates. In later years, James discouraged biographies and variously described his mother as the daughter of an aristocratic Virginia family or having come from Santo Domingo. However, their mixed race was known to some; writing to Archbishop John Hughes in 1859, Bishop John Bernard Fitzpatrick mentioned that James' brother Sherwood Healy "has African blood and it shews [sic] distinctly in his exterior."
Some three decades after the last of the Healy children died, Jesuit sociologist Albert S. Foley published a book in 1954 that detailed their biracial background.
Education
As enslaved people under Georgia law, the Healy children were prohibited from attending school. In 1837, at age seven, Michael Healy took James to New York and enrolled him at a Quaker school in Flushing, New York City that was associated with the Old Quaker Meeting House. James continued his education at another Quaker school in Burlington, New Jersey, where he excelled in mathematics and apprenticed to a surveyor. After Michael Healy became acquainted with Bishop John Fitzpatrick of Boston, he sent his son to the College of the Holy Cross, a newly founded Jesuit school in Worcester, Massachusetts.
James Healy entered Holy Cross in August 1844 and would later recount in his diary, "Today, 5 years ago I entered this college. What a change. Then I was nothing, now I am a Catholic." He and his brothers Hugh, Patrick, and Sherwood were baptized at Holy Cross in November 1844, alongside the sons of Catholic convert Orestes Brownson. James spent his school vacations with the families of local priests in Boston and Cambridge. He was named valedictorian of the first graduating class at Holy Cross in 1849.
