My father photographed a Black Catholic parish in North Philly in the 1950s. It’s taken me years to learn its special history.

In 1953, my father, Jerry Dantzic, quit his job as a writer and editor for 20th Century Fox and declared in a letter to his sister Anita that he’d chosen a new occupation. “For better or worse,” he wrote, “I have taken the plunge, as a photojournalist!”

Two years later, when his images of life at St. Elizabeth Church — a predominantly Black Catholic parish in North Philadelphia — were published in 1955, it marked a significant step forward in a career that would span more than four decades.

His work was featured on album covers for RCA Victor, Epic, and other labels, and in publications such as the New York Times, Look, Life, and the Saturday Evening Post. Dad’s images are also part of the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art.

But I had never heard of Philadelphia’s connection to one of the earliest chapters of my father’s career until until African American photo historian, curator, and author Deborah Willis asked me about the images nearly two decades ago. In fact, it took me more than 15 years of scouring online auctions and old periodical shops to even find a copy of the small religious magazine where the photos first appeared.

In all, my father shot 10 rolls of black-and-white 35mm film with his Leica M3s. He took more than 360 images, most of which have never been seen before. Thirteen images appeared in the September 1955 issue of Jubilee, a 72,000-circulation photo magazine devoted to covering Catholic news.

“What happened within the confines of St. Elizabeth’s parish in North Philadelphia reflected the general picture in the North: when Negroes moved in, whites moved out,” began one of the opening paragraphs of an essay that accompanied the images. “Originally a German, then an Irish parish, St. Elizabeth’s was wealthy and populous, with a church which served 1,000 families and a school which enrolled 2,000 children. When in 1937 Father (now Monsignor) Edward F. Cunnie arrived to assume the pastorate, he was too late to halt the white exodus: three fifths of the original parishioners had already left and school enrollment was down to 600 (it was to drop to 200): the incoming Negroes included only a handful of Catholics. St. Elizabeth’s might have died then, had not Father Cunnie, saying ‘God is good,’ gone to work.”

The six-page article provided a rare, compassionate view of the African American community’s rich spiritual life, showing, among other subjects, children in Sunday school, parishioners taking communion, baptisms, and congregants in prayer.

But I wanted to learn more about this remarkable parish, and how it formed a thread that was connected to the rich legacy of my father’s concerned focus on the diversity of American cultures and communities.

So I reached out to Kim Walker, director of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia’s Office for Black Catholics, who introduced me to the Rev. Rayford E. Emmons, parochial vicar at Holy Cross Catholic Church in Mount Airy. Emmons, 76, the first African American priest ordained in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, is in his 51st year of service to parishioners.

Besides his expertise on Black Catholicism in Philadelphia, he has served in 14 parishes in the archdiocese, including St. Elizabeth, where he was named pastor in 1987.

Six years later, St. Elizabeth was one of 16 parishes identified for closure by the archdiocese. While the church itself was demolished, the rectory now serves as a residence for formerly homeless people operated by Project HOME.

I spoke with Father Emmons about the forward-looking social justice policies of the late Msgr. Cunnie, the parishioner’s vision of racial reconciliation, and the historical significance of St. Elizabeth to Black Catholics in the North Philadelphia community and beyond.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Q: Can you tell me a little bit about what St. Elizabeth’s was like when these photos were taken?

A: St. Elizabeth in 1955 was considered the leading church in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia in terms of working in the Black community. The pastor, Msgr. Edward Cunnie inherited the parish some time in the 1940s as the parish was changing from white to Black. It was right during the time when there was a second great migration of Black people from the South to the North. And the first migration was sometime right after World War I. You had this huge migration of millions of African Americans who left the South and came north to find jobs, find prosperity, find a new life, find freedom. Msgr. Cunnie had brought in priests from other countries — Belgium, in particular — who had worked in Africa. And he said, “Hey, look, this is it. We need you guys to help us in the United States with Black Catholics.” So they had been able to establish three basic things. One, tremendous evangelization to the Black community in North Philadelphia. Then they were able to maintain other churches, Catholic churches in Philadelphia, going from white to Black. And to do the same thing they did in those parishes that they had done at St. Elizabeth’s — and grow the Black Catholic community. And they formed a network of Black Catholic parishes that were modeled after St. Elizabeth’s.

Q: The Jubilee article says that Msgr. Cunnie had devised several unusual solutions to the educational and social problems of the congregation and it references providing parishioners with simple things that were missing in their lives — shoes, hot meals, hot lunches. It sounds like he was ahead of his time.

A: He was a dynamo. He did three other things of significance. One, when he first started working in Black Catholic parishes, he contacted Mother Katharine Drexel, who was with the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament up in Cornwells Heights, Bensalem. And he says, “How do you do missionary work in the Deep South, where you guys can get lynched, and still are effective in bringing Black women to church, and establishing schools and institutions and parishes? How can you do that without getting wiped out? I’m in Philadelphia, so we don’t have those problems, but we still have discrimination.” And they showed him. He also connected with the Holy Ghost Fathers, who ran the parishes in the South, and he said, ”What do you guys do? You’re a missionary. What do you do to keep this thing going?” So he listened to them. Msgr. Cunnie, also during his summer vacations, would visit missions in the Caribbean where the Holy Ghost Fathers would work with Blacks, and he used those same methods in St. Elizabeth’s Church to have strong schools, strong social organizations, strong parish religious activities, and evangelize. And do things like establish a credit union for Black Catholics. And the third thing that Monsignor did during his tenure at St. Elizabeth was establish something called the Catholic Interracial Council. So St. Elizabeth parish became the model for what was going on in Philadelphia for working in the Black community.

Q: What is his legacy within the community today? Do people remember him?

A: People do great things and people forget them because their names aren’t kept alive. Msgr. Cunnie’s life did have influence because St. Elizabeth’s became so well known, and so adept at doing its work, and pioneering, that it inspired others. Leon Sullivan, when he came to Philadelphia in the 1950s, was looking for a model to establish to create economic viability for the Black community. He contacted the people at St. Elizabeth’s in North Philly. He says, “What are you guys doing that works?” So he talked to St. Elizabeth’s and picked up a lot of ideas and incorporated them into the Opportunities Industrialization Center, then an organization that established Progress Plaza, which is the first minority-owned shopping center in the United States of America. He also establishes the first community development corporation in the United States of America, and he established a housing area called Yorktown. All this stuff was brand new — ideas that eventually became nationally modeled and imitated internationally.

Q: With respect to your time at St. Elizabeth’s, I know that it closed in 1993.

A: I was the last pastor up there. We did everything we could think of to save the place. In fact, there was this big fundraising effort. And they try to look at proportionately — how many persons you have per dollar pledged. St. Elizabeth’s was the topper. We raised more money proportionately with the people in our effort than any other parish.

Q: What happened when St. Elizabeth was no more?

A: The No. 1 thing the Catholic Church does is support poor communities. Our ability to build institutions and community is more than just, you know, we’re trying to bring you to the Lord as an individual. The Catholic Church wants to build an institution. And that is our significant contribution to the United States of America, to people’s lives. So Msgr. Cunnie was saying, “We’re going to bring the best the Catholic Church has to give into these poor, poor communities.” In fact, right now the geographical area for St. Elizabeth’s is located in still one of the poorer, poorer zip codes in the country. And even under those circumstances, thousands, thousands of young people are going to the schools. And most of them turn up pretty darn good. When I was there, I took a statistical study to find out how many young people were going to college from our school. We lived in a community in the 1980s and 1990s where one third of the kids who finished grade school would finish high school. One third. Two-thirds didn’t finish. And 10% of the ones who finish high school go to college. That’s horrifying. In Catholic education, 95% of the kids who finished St. Elizabeth’s would finish high school and 40% or 50% would go to college. Radical difference. And some of these kids just took off. They’re nurses, doctors, government officials, millionaires. I mean, you know, this guy Charles Fuller who won the Pulitzer Prize for A Soldier’s Play, who would have been a student when Cunnie was there, became a millionaire. Several millionaires came out of that school.

Q: You were the first Black Catholic priest ordained in Philadelphia 51 years ago. How do you view your own legacy in the context of St. Elizabeth’s and the archdiocese?

A: When you look at how much time, money, effort, energy, and resources the Catholic Church has put into the Black Catholic community, just in Philadelphia there’s been hundreds of millions of dollars, hundreds of hours of instruction. It’s thousands of personnel over the centuries that the Catholic Church has put in — the nuns, the priests, the lay people — to work in various organizations … that’s directly affected the Black community who have been in the archdiocese as baptized people since 1743. When I look back at my 50 years as a priest, it’s been a challenging venture. It’s been an opportunity for me to see and do things that I would’ve never done as a priest. It’s been pioneering. It’s been an opportunity to grow my spiritual life. I don’t know what my impact has been like in the archdiocese. A lot of times people are overlooked, like Msgr. Cunnie. My goal when I became a priest was to do everything I could to make sure people really respected Black Catholics, and that they would walk away with the impression that “Those Black Catholics are pretty good,” and that they would be able to say, “You know, well, I met one and he’s a priest. He preaches well, he organizes well, he works with people well. He’s a good role model for what all Black Catholics are and what they can be.” I’m happy when I look back at the legacy that the growth of Black Catholics, the numbers of people and clergy, and in leadership in the last 50 years. We’ve come a long way, and, you know, I’m happy to have been a part of that history. It’s beautiful.

Grayson Dantzic is a photographer, author, curator, and archivist who in addition to his continuing work with the Jerry Dantzic Archives, is the archival consultant for the Morrison Hotel Gallery, project archivist and owner of the Paul Seligman Collection at the Metropolitan Opera Archives, and historian and archivist for the American Society of Media Photographers. He is the executive vice president of the American Photography Archives Group, of which he is a founding member.