09/03/2026
Before Black women in New Orleans were freely wearing the habit of a Catholic nun, they were already doing the work.
In 1842, nearly twenty years before the Civil War, Henriette DeLille helped establish what became the Sisters of the Holy Family, a religious community of women of African descent in a city where slavery was still legal and race governed almost every part of life.
The sisters went directly to people others neglected. They educated Black children, instructed enslaved and free people of color, cared for orphans, visited the sick and provided refuge for elderly women.
But even devotion did not erase the color line. The women faced racial restrictions in society and within Catholic religious life. In their early years, they did not initially wear the traditional religious habit publicly.
DeLille died in 1862. Her community survived and grew.
By the late nineteenth century, the sisters operated schools, convents, an orphanage and a home for the elderly. In 1898, members traveled to British Honduras, now Belize, beginning a missionary presence that lasted generations.
Then came this remarkable photograph.
Around 1900, dozens of sisters sat together in their habits, row after row of Black women facing the camera. A photograph of the congregation was included in the American Negro Exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition, created to challenge racist portrayals of Black Americans with evidence of their institutions, education and achievements.
To someone in Paris, it may have looked like a photograph of nuns.
It was much more.
These were Black women displaying what they had built in a country that had once denied many of them even the most basic freedoms.
