Mother Elizabeth Clovis Lange founded and organized the nation's first African American Roman Catholic order, the Oblate Sisters of Providence, which is recognized as the first of its kind in the world. The order's first school opened in 1828 in Baltimore, Maryland. By the time of her death, the Oblate order had expanded to other cities in the United States, the Caribbean, and Central America.
Background
Very little is known about Lange's childhood. It is thought that she was bom in 1784 in St. Domingue (renamed Haiti after the revolution) to Clovis and Annette Lange, who fled to Cuba sometime before the Haitian Revolution led by Toussaint L'Ouverture. Annette later left Cuba with her daughter Elizabeth, but Clovis did not accompany them. They went to the United States, where they spent a short period of time in Charleston, South Carolina, before settling in Baltimore in 1817. For unknown reasons, soon after their arrival, Annette returned to the West Indies, and Lange, already in her thirties, remained in Baltimore.
Education
Elizabeth Lange had pure education, just in relegious theme she was pretty good.
Career
During the late 1700s and early 1800s, large waves of French political refugees fleeing the French Revolution and Haitians fleeing the slave uprising that led to the Haitian Revolution arrived on the shores of Baltimore, Maryland, a slave-holding state. This large French-speaking population included a sizable educated and wealthy community of free blacks, also referred to at the time as "colored" émigrés. When Lange arrived she joined this overwhelmingly Catholic community in the Fells Point area of the city at St. Mary's Seminary Chapel, the nucleus of religious activity for black and white Haitians. However, the African or black congregants were relegated to worshipping in the basement of the church what they referred to as the "chapelle basse."
Finding that public education for blacks, and girls in particular, was strongly discouraged in Maryland, Lange, in collaboration with her friend Marie Magdalene Balas, opened a school for girls in her home around 1820. However, in 1827 she was forced to close the school for lack of funds. A strong and deeply religious woman, she did not waver in her desire to establish a school for black children, and soon found a supporter in Father James Hector Joubert, a member of the Sulpician order. Joubert had been encountering difficulties in teaching black children the catechism because they could not read. Lange's familiarity with the ethnicity and language of the refugees and her teaching ability were important to Joubert's goals. He actively supported not only her educational aspirations but also her religious vocation at a time when only white women were admitted to religious orders. In defiance of the existing order, Lange, a black woman in a slaveholding state in a male-dominated society, a Catholic at a time when this was unpopular, and a Francophile in an English-speaking community, established a school for neglected black children and a religious order for black women who were not welcomed in the existing Catholic religious orders.
In June 1828, with the approval of the archbishop of Baltimore, she established the religious order of the Oblate Sisters of Providence and its first school. Reflecting the male-dominated society of that time, sponsor Father Joubert was named director and administrator of the institution. The first group of Oblate Sisters of Providence took their vows on July 2, 1829, and began teaching the previously neglected black children in their new school, St. Frances Academy, which also served as one of the earliest teacher-training institutes for black women in Baltimore. Lange's vision of what real learning should encompass encouraged her students to strive for excellence. She developed a curriculum that went beyond the three R's to include music, classics, and fine arts. Central to the young ladies' education was religious instruction and vocational training in domestic arts and embroidery.
In addition to their work as educators, the order also became involved in the community and cared for the sick and the poor. During the city's cholera epidemics the sisters worked in the almshouses, caring for the black inmates. They faced very difficult times after Father Joubert's death in 1843, when the Catholic Church authorities abandoned their support of the Oblate Sisters. The archbishop, whose family were slave owners, ordered them to disband. It was a shock to the white community when Lange refused to follow his orders and continued to work for the advancement and freedom of the black community. Notwithstanding the hardship, for four years the Oblates survived by sewing and taking in other people's washing.
In addition to St. Frances Academy, Lange and her religious community established an orphanage and a widows home and conducted a night school that provided literacy training to black adults. In 1857 they started St. Joseph's School in South Baltimore and St. Michael's School in Fells Point. Very little, if any, public recognition was given to them, and for years the Oblate Sisters had to tolerate racist Catholics who thought it was disgraceful that black women should wear a "holy habit." There was even a time when an angry mob broke down their front door. Nevertheless, by the time of Lange's death in 1882 the Oblate Sisters had established schools and orphanages beyond the boundaries of Maryland in Philadelphia, New Orleans, and in 1880 began their westward movement, opening the St. Louis Missions.
It wasn't until the 1980s, long after the beginning of the civil rights movement, and 100 years after Lange's death, that her memory resurfaced. In light of this resurgence, it is important to recognize that Lange's establishment of a religious order was a first for black women in the history of the Catholic Church and that her religious fervor and devotion to God did not stand in the way of her advocating for social justice. Tier devotees now await a miracle that can have no possible human or scientific explanation, which will allow her route to sainthood to unfold.