(Gail Carter, a longtime member of St. Margaret of Scotland Parish in Capitol Heights, Maryland, was interviewed for the Black Catholic Voices series on Feb. 10, 2021 at the Archdiocesan Pastoral Center’s chapel in Hyattsville by Mark Zimmermann, the Catholic Standard’s editor. She and her husband Bruce Carter marked their 50th wedding anniversary on Feb. 27. They have a daughter, Anita Proctor, and a son, Derrick Jerome Carter, and four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
Gail Carter, a native of Washington, D.C., is a lifelong Catholic and grew up in St. Martin of Tours Parish. Josephite Father Charles Chester Ball was her cousin and baptized older members of their family. She graduated from St. Martin of Tours School and Notre Dame High School in Washington before attending Howard University, where she studied early childhood education.
After working for the U.S. Department of the Treasury building computers, she retired in 2004. “From the moment I retired, I completely dedicated my life to the parish,” she said, explaining that she volunteers at St. Margaret of Scotland Parish for two to three days each week.
She serves as chairman of the Faith Formation Committee there and has volunteered with St. Margaret’s RCIA program for more than three decades, helping people becoming new members of the Catholic Church there. She has also served as a parish council president there and as president of its Parent Teacher Association, and as a Eucharistic minister and with the Lazarus bereavement ministry. During the pandemic, she has also been participating in online prayer meetings sponsored by the parish on Monday evenings. The video of her interview is linked at the end of the transcript that follows.)
Gail Carter, photographed near the altar of the St. Ursula Chapel at the Archdiocese of Washington's Pastoral Center, was interviewed at the chapel for the Black Catholic Voices series. (CS photo/Mihoko Owada)
How would you summarize your faith journey as a Catholic who is African American?
Gail Carter – “My faith journey I would summarize in this manner: I came in as a cradle Catholic in a community that was mostly where the people look like me. From kindergarten to eighth grade, the only people that I saw that didn’t look like me were the priests and the sisters. We had the Sisters of Notre Dame in our parish. So it was a very comfortable, very loving environment, very supportive. We walked to school every day, and everybody along that journey knew us, and so we couldn’t do anything wrong because it would get back to our parents before we got home, but it was just a loving community. and I had a very strong upbringing.”
Have you personally experienced any instances of racism in society or the Catholic Church that remain painful memories?
Gail Carter – “It didn’t change for me until I went to high school. When I went to high school – back then you had to take a test to get into the high school of your choice, and I wanted to go to Notre Dame High School because I was familiar with the Notre Dame sisters – I thought I was walking into the same environment that I was leaving, but it was entirely different.
“When I got into Notre Dame, our class was probably the largest class of African Americans in the school. There were 10 of us, and we later found out, it didn’t take too long, but we found out that we were deemed, ‘the terrible 10.’ We came in with our Afros, and we were different, and I thought people accepted you for who you were. That’s what I grew up with, but it wasn’t like that.
“We would hear side remarks. I can remember the first time I realized that I was different was when I was in the ladies room, and they didn’t know I was in there, and there was a conversation among students, people that were in the class with me that I thought liked me, and they talked about my hair being different, about the color of our skin and how slow we were.
“I should take a step back to say that when we got to the high school the first thing we had to do was take a placement test. The majority of us were placed on level three, level-C. I think there were two in level one and maybe two in level two. So, we were looked at as the “C” students, and our curriculum and everything was different. It was less than those in the other levels, but I was still proud because my parents sacrificed a lot for me to go there and the teachers were good.
In the interview, Gail Carter said “the first time I realized that I was different” was during her years at a Catholic high school. (CS photo/Mihoko Owada)
“I didn’t run into a bad situation with a teacher until the 10th grade. I had a Spanish teacher who was very much a stickler for detail, and she told us that when we take a test we cannot cross out anything on that test. If we did, we would get a zero. So I studied so hard getting ready for that test. It was a very crucial test, and I was looking over the test at the end, and I realized I made one mistake. So I took a small line through and wrote the correct answer over (the) top. When I got my paper back, it had 100 drawn through it with a line and then 0. I was devastated.
“I remember standing by my locker just crying my eyes out, and one of my Caucasian friends came over and she said, ‘What’s wrong?’, and I told her what happened. She looked at my paper. She couldn’t believe it. She said, ‘I want to show you something.’ She gave me her paper. She had a 69 with more Xs and crossed out (words). It was atrocious. She said, ‘I want you to take this and show it to your parents.’
“So when I got home, I showed it to my mother and father, both of them. And my parents did everything in their possible realm not to expose us to the life that they were experiencing outside of the home, outside of our community, but for this it was as though my father was hit right in the face, and he went from 0 to 100 in a matter of seconds.
“And my mother had to ask me to leave the room, but I could still listen and still hear the conversation, and all I can hear my father saying is, ‘I didn’t want my children to experience this. They don’t deserve this. She tried so hard.’ And my mother was very calm, and she said, “We will go to the school tomorrow. We will go together, but only I will speak.’
“So I wasn’t in the room with them when they met with the principal, and I know that the teacher was called in. All I know is when I got to the classroom, she gave me my test back with the 0 crossed out, and I was restored to a 100, and when I got home that night my father told me, ‘Okay, you know you are going to have to be 10 times better now. You’re going to have to work 10 times harder, and it still may not be enough, but whatever you do, we will always be proud of you. You are God’s gift to us.’
“And that’s the way I looked at it for my next three years there. There were good times, but a wall had built up, a protective wall, it did not make me feel comfortable and safe like I did in elementary school, and that wall remained there, when I went to college, when I went into the working world.
Gail Carter said after her experiences in high school, a ‘protective wall’ wen up around her that continued through college and her entrance into the working world. (CS photo/Mihoko Owada)
“It (that wall) didn't start to come down until we had revivals in the Church. Jackie (Wilson, who served from 1979 to 2002 as the executive director of the Office of Black Catholics for the Archdiocese of Washingt0n) had revivals at St. Matthew's Cathedral. That’s where I first met her… Seeing other people witness to their faith, other Black Catholics, it did shape me because every time somebody would witness, part of it (was), I would hear my own story or I would hear something that brought me closer to Christ.
“Working with Jackie Wilson, we met at the revival and just formed an instant connection. When she did the Rejoice! conferences (on Black Catholic liturgy) and there would be witnesses there, I was right there beside her. In preparation for the congress, the first congress of the 20th century, I was one of the 10 selected for that congress, (from the Archdiocese of Washington, to participate in) the National Black Catholic Congress, and Jackie wanted us to be ready.
“So, for an entire year the 10 of us had to study. We had stacks of material. We studied about our faith. We studied about Black Catholic history, things I had never learned in school, and I went to Catholic school for 13 years, but she educated us. And the more educated I became, the closer I became in my faith, the stronger my faith became.
“It also inspired me listening to other people’s journeys for the ministry that I was meant to be in, and that’s RCIA, the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults, and every time somebody took a journey it was different, and every time they witnessed, a part of it would become a part of me, and I would share my journey with them.
“And my wall started to come down, (because of) the closeness that I felt, and the interesting thing is that when I was with RCIA, my mentor was Deacon John Somerville. Someone had invited me to come and be their sponsor. That’s how I got involved with it, and he was the person leading the session. When she finished her journey, I couldn’t leave. (I thought,) I just want to sit at his feet and continue to absorb everything that he was sharing. So I continued for another two years, and then he was reassigned to the (National) Shrine, and I took over RCIA (at St. Margaret’s Parish). But it brought me stronger and more committed to my faith.
“Now to go back to the congress, all that Jackie taught me and all that we experienced for that year, I was flying on cloud nine, and I wanted to share it with my parish what I was learning. Every week I would go and talk to my pastor, and I would tell him what I had just learned, what I experienced. He seemed to be excited too. So my guard was way down. When I came back from the congress, I told him I wanted to share with the community what I had just experienced, and he agreed.
“What I didn’t know was while I was excited, he was talking to the parishioners and telling them I was promoting separatism in the Church. That’s what we went through (after) the first congress. So that night when we had our big session, Deacon Somerville had gotten called to the shrine, so I had to do it alone, and as soon as I started, I said, ‘Let’s start in prayer.’ We prayed, and then I started to talk about the congress, and a hand went up in the back, (and that person said,) ‘I heard you were promoting separatism in the Catholic Church. We don’t do that here.’ I was like, ‘What? Where is that coming from?’
“And then more people started bombarding and talking about it. And all of a sudden my pastor says, ‘We’ve heard enough of this. We can end this session right now.’
“And I said, ‘Okay, but before you leave here, we’re going to end this session the way we started, in prayer,’ and before he could walk out, I had grabbed his hand. That was my father in me coming out, and I said, ‘Let’s say the Lord’s Prayer,’ and then he stormed out, but my father always taught me, don’t ever let them see you cry.
“So I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t say anything, but I had one ally in that room who came up who knew me and he said, ‘Let’s go. Don’t say anything.’ He took me to his car. He said, ‘We’ll come back for your car tomorrow, and as soon as we get off this property, free yourself,’ and I sobbed.
“I sobbed all the way home, and when I got home, I called Jackie and I said, ‘Jackie, I can’t do this anymore. I cannot be a part of this type of environment,’ and I told her what happened. And my husband walked in the room. He saw me crying. I couldn’t even tell him what happened, because he’s not Catholic. I was still protecting my faith. She hung up, and he’s sitting there trying to figure out, ‘Why you crying? Tell me what happened.’ This was supposed to be a great time in my life.
“And the phone rang, I said, ‘I don’t want to talk to anybody.’ So he has the phone, and he says, ‘You need to take this call,’ and I said, ‘No, I don’t.’ He said, ‘Gail, please, take the call.’ So, I said, ‘Hello.’ He said, ‘Gail this is Bishop Marino,’ (then-Washington Auxiliary Bishop Eugene Marino) and I said, ‘Yeah, right.’ He said, ‘No, this is Bishop Marino. First I want to apologize for what you just experienced,’ and he was so warm and so soothing. He said, ‘Do you have another Catholic church that you can go to for now until I call you back?’ I said, ‘Well, I can go to St. Benedict the Moor, that’s where my son goes to school.’ He said, ‘Okay I’ll call you when I need you.’
“A whole year went by, but he had been giving me some instructions. I was not to do anything in St. Benedict the Moor but sit there and heal, pray and let God heal me. That didn’t quite work out with me, because I became president of the PTA at St. Benedict the Moor.
“But I did come to church and pray every week, and when the year was up, he called me, he said, ‘I need you to come back to St. Margaret’s.’ I go back to St. Margaret’s for a meeting that night, and it was the night that the Sacred Heart community was then going to take over our parish.
“What I didn’t know was the pastor that had been there had been removed like a month later (after the incident), and they had an interim priest there. I think it was Father (Kevin) Hart was there for almost a year before the Sacred Heart community came in. And the first thing I remember hearing Father (Columban) Crotty, the new pastor say, ‘On behalf of the Catholic Church, I want to apologize for all the pain you have experienced.’
“I had never in my life heard a priest stand up in a public arena and say that. That was very freeing for me, and it was a turning point, because when I came back, I came back to serve. That’s how I was raised, to serve. So that’s what I came back for.”
Gail Carter said that when she returned to St. Margaret's Parish, “I came back to serve.” (CS photo/Mihoko Owada)
What is your reaction to the nationwide demonstrations for racial justice that have happened since this spring in the wake of unarmed men and women of color being killed by police?
Gail Carter – “My feelings on what has happened since the spring in regard to Black men being killed by police and the racial inequality – first of all, it didn’t just start in the spring. (But) I have two sides, one side, as a mother and as a grandmother, I feel the pain of the parents, and it made me very protective of the males in my family.
“My other side is, I was married to a police officer, and I watched him come on to the police department in the District to a police department that didn’t want him because he was Black, to a community he was assigned, the first to Georgetown. Many calls he would go on, and when he’d get there to serve, to help, they’d say, ‘We didn’t ask for a colored police officer.’ I had to live through that with him, but he still served. He even went up in the ranks so he could make a difference and a change. So I knew a lot of policemen, and I know how committed they were to the community.
“All policemen aren’t bad, but on the other hand, the training that exists today for our police officers is not strong enough. The rules have become complacent as to how people should be treated. I know my nephews have been pulled over because they drove a nice car, and we had to tell them, no matter what, don’t say anything, so we can make sure they got back safely. They hadn’t done anything wrong. That was the norm. That’s become the norm.
“So I’m angry and I’m sad, but what’s going on right now is we are in the age of technology. So everybody has a cell phone and wherever you are going, somebody is going to record it. That’s the only reason we’re knowing so much about it now. They are recording everything, and so it’s being brought to the forefront, and it can’t be denied. Truth comes to light. That’s what I see.”
People of color – African Americans, Latinos and Native Americans – have been hardest hit by the health and economic impacts of the coronavirus pandemic. What does this say about our country, and what should our country do about this?
Gail Carter – “The coronavirus has revealed, say pulled off the Band-Aid, to a lot of things that were hidden in society. They cannot be denied anymore. In my family it has hit twice. Once to our family in North Carolina, and once to our family up here. We lost one member in North Carolina. She was a nurse, and she died because her body hadn’t completely healed yet. She was back at work. She had just given birth to a seven-month-old baby. And now, we have a great nephew who will never know his mother.
“What I see the difference is, that the African American community as well as the Hispanic community are very family (oriented) and very close together. We do everything together as family. So if one person gets sick, chances are it’s going to spread through the family. So many of them live together, and we celebrate everything. Which is how my family got (the coronavirus) spread in North Carolina. There was a birthday celebration. They didn’t know the person had it in the family, and it went through like wildfire through our whole family down in North Carolina.
“What the United States needs to do is improve health care. So many people are afraid. They are afraid to go to the doctors. They are afraid especially during this time of the virus. They’re afraid to go anywhere. I pray that now that we have vaccine, people will step up and get the shot. I work with the seniors. They are so afraid to take that shot, because their memories of past vaccines in the African American community are frightening. They knew what went on.
“So to try to educate them – there needs to be better education – is a journey that we have to take as a country. We have to go to them and give them that shot. Take it to the local CVS, when they can just walk, and get their shot, because they’re not going to drive to Rockville. They’re not going to drive to Virginia to get their shot. They live here in the local community. So we need to make it more accessible for them.
“Right now, I’m trying to get a woman who’s 102 years-old, and she called me. She said, ‘Okay Gail, I’m ready to take the shot now.’ But I got to go through the process to get her a shot. Don’t know when I’ll be able to get her through but I’m going to do my best.”
When asked what the Catholic Church and individual Catholics should do to confront racism, Gail Carter said Black Catholics “must have a voice” in the Church. (CS photo/Mihoko Owada)
Cardinal Gregory has noted that while the nation confronts the coronavirus, it must also address the virus of racism. What do you think the Catholic Church should do as an institution to combat racism, and what do you think individual Catholics should do?
Gail Carter – “What should the Catholic Church do to confront racism and what should the individual do? Well this is something, a journey, that I’ve been on ever since I’ve known Jackie Wilson. Back in the day when Cardinal Hickey (Cardinal James Hickey, the archbishop of Washington from 1980 to 2000) was here, he had a Council of Black Catholics and I was a part of that, when he would meet with us once a month and we would discuss the issues, and we would make recommendations on what we needed to see in this diocese.
“You see, the one thing, we’ve learned is if there’s going to be any real change, we must be sitting at the table. You can’t sit there at the table for me and tell me what’s good for me. I must have a voice, which is why I make myself so present in my church.
“There are things that we asked for, and I can almost say that it’s still not being done. One of the main things is when Jackie started, she was invited to come and give a two-hour seminar to seminarians who were about to be priests and then put into African American communities or Hispanic communities. That just wasn’t good, because you aren’t learning about who we are. We recommended long terms. Today I would say it should be a whole year of study. You need to know the Black Catholic history. There’s enough published now that they can learn, but it should be taught.
“For every priest that is coming into an archdiocese where they have a possibility of possibly being assigned to an African American community, they need to have really talked, to have discussions with African Americans before they enter that parish, because what happens now? You send a young priest in who’s been to Rome, and they don’t know how we do things or how we feel about things or what our traditions are, and they come in with (an attitude of) this is the way the Church should be.
“And we were raised back in the day (of) ‘Father said,’ (and) that’s what we did. Well, I’ve come past that point now. I want to talk with you, Father, and if there’s discrepancies, we need to work through them. It ends up better for both of us. And that’s what we need to do. We need to be at the table. We need to educate our priests.
“If you’re going to send a priest to an Hispanic community you’re certainly going to teach them the language, but how much of that culture do they learn before they go in? They need to understand the people to know where to start, what’s going to work and what’s not going to work.
“I’ve been through that many times. We finally have a new community in our parish, the African Mission Society, these priests have worked in Africa, they worked in African American communities, and it’s a whole new environment for me. I feel like we started on level six versus one and one-half. It’s good, and we’re going to build a strong relationship, because they know us, because they lived with us. So, that’s how I feel.”
Gail Carter said witnessing the journey of faith of her parents and her grandmother has helped her keep the faith over the years and know that God is always with her. (CS photo/Mihoko Owada)
How have you kept the faith, both your Catholic faith and your faith for our country, over the years, despite this “virus” of racism that has infected both, and what gives you hope for a better future for our Church and our country?
Gail Carter – ‘Watching my grandmother and my mother and my father on their journey of faith has helped me to keep my faith strong. I learned from them, that when things are rough, we’re never alone.
“I’ve experienced God’s presence in so many ways, that now it’s a constant conversation from the moment I get up till the time I go to bed, Jesus is right there beside me, guiding me. Whenever I have a struggle or I’m going into an area that I’m not familiar with, Jesus is right there. He’s a part of me. He’s a part of my kids. He’s a part of my grandchildren.
“I love hearing my little great-grandson who is two. I’ll say, ‘Jeremiah, where’s Jesus?’ He says, ‘Jesus, Jesus?’ And he’ll take me to his bedroom and show me Jesus. He’s in there somewhere, but he knows who Jesus is and that’s what gives me hope for the future.
“God is so good and so loving. And when we’ve had the roughest times, our parish lost a priest at the very beginning in January of last year, we probably, if we weren’t such a strong community, we would have crumbled, but our motto is, ‘We’re all in this together.’ We even had our music director, Joseph Joy, write a song, ‘We’re All in This Together,’ and we sing it and we feel it. That’s how we’ve made it through this year. And we’re much stronger now than before the pandemic.”
It was “a day of celebration” when she heard that Pope Francis had named Washington Archbishop Wilton Gregory as a cardinal, Gail Carter said. (CS photo/Mihoko Owada)
What is your reaction to Pope Francis elevating Washington Cardinal Wilton Gregory to the College of Cardinals, making him the first African American cardinal in the history of the Catholic Church in the United States – what does that mean to you, and what do you think it means to the nation’s Black Catholics?
Gail Carter – “To hear Cardinal Gregory (was) to be elevated to cardinal, it was a day of celebration, and my first reaction was to call my mentor Jackie Wilson. I said, ‘Jackie did you hear it?’ She said, ‘Yes, I did.’ And she told me a story of how the Black Catholic administrators had already had this conversation years and years ago, trying to figure out who would be the first cardinal, and he was the one. They already knew. They saw the anointing on him.
“For the Church, it gives us a seat at the table. He knows us, because he has been us. So he speaks for us. We can respect that. Our role is to support him, because we know that this is not an easy road for him. He’s the first, but he will open the door for others. The only way there will be change in this Church of the United States is if we’re when sitting at the very top, at the table. We have to have a voice, someone who will speak on our behalf, and Cardinal Gregory is that person.”
