Sister Thea Bowman

Bertha Elizabeth Bowman was born on the twenty-ninth of December 1937 at Yazoo City, Mississippi, the only child of Theon Edward Bowman — one of the very few Black physicians in mid-twentieth-century Mississippi — and Mary Esther Coleman Bowman, a schoolteacher. The Bowman household at Canton, Mississippi, was Protestant; the only school accepting Black children in Canton was the Holy Child Jesus parochial school run by the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration of La Crosse, Wisconsin. She entered the school at nine and at the age of nine, against her parents' substantial objection, asked to be baptised into the Catholic Church.

She entered the Franciscan novitiate at La Crosse at fifteen — the only African American Sister of the congregation — and took her final vows in 1956 with the religious name Thea, meaning of God. She completed the bachelor's degree at Viterbo College in 1965, the master's in English at Catholic University in 1969, and the doctorate in English literature at Catholic University in 1972 with a dissertation on Saint Thomas More. She taught from 1972 at Viterbo and from 1978 at the Institute for Black Catholic Studies at Xavier University of Louisiana — the only historically Black Catholic university in the United States.

Her decisive contribution to African American Catholicism took the form of the lecture-and-song workshops she conducted across the United States from the late 1970s through the 1980s — in which she addressed several hundred Catholic dioceses, parishes and religious orders on the integration of African American liturgical, musical and spiritual traditions into the Roman rite. She held an honorary doctorate in theology from Boston College and the Laetare Medal of the University of Notre Dame.

In 1989 — having been diagnosed with bone cancer in 1984 — she addressed in a wheelchair the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops at Seton Hall on the question of what it means to be Black and Catholic. The bishops at her invitation joined her, hands joined, in singing "We Shall Overcome." She died at her family home at Canton on the thirtieth of March 1990, at fifty-two. Her cause for canonization was opened in 2018.

She is honored here as the foremost African American Catholic voice of her generation.