Father Augustus Tolton

Augustus John Tolton was born into slavery on April 1, 1854, on the Stephen Elliott plantation in Brush Creek, Ralls County, Missouri — the second of three children of Peter Paul Tolton and Martha Jane Chisley, with an older brother, Charley, and a younger sister, Anne. Baptized in the Catholic faith his enslavers practiced, he carried that faith through bondage and into freedom.

During the Civil War his mother made a daring escape, crossing the Mississippi River with her children into Illinois and settling in Quincy. There the young Augustus labored in a tobacco factory, yet local Irish- and German-American priests and nuns recognized his gifts and quietly nurtured his education and his calling to the priesthood.

Rejected by every American seminary because of his race, Tolton was received at last by the Pontifical Urban University in Rome, where he was ordained on April 24, 1886. Expecting to be sent to Africa, he was instead returned to the United States, becoming the first publicly known African American Catholic priest and ministering first in Quincy and then in Chicago.

In Chicago he gathered the city's Black Catholics and, as founding pastor, built St. Monica's parish on the South Side. Worn by his labors, he died of heatstroke on July 9, 1897, at only forty-three. Declared Venerable by the Church, Father Augustus Tolton is honored as a pioneer whose dignity no chain could bind.