Come join us from noon to 4 p.m. Saturday as Mother of Mercy Catholic Church hosts an open house. At 1 p.m., speaker Larry McDaniel will talk on the history of our church and school and our imprint on the City of Washington and our country.

Mother of Mercy Catholic Church is celebrating 190 years of Catholicism having a formal presence in North Carolina. The first Catholic Church in North Carolina was located at Third and Van Norden streets. This was St. John the Evangelist, which was consecrated March 25, 1829, and destroyed by fire on April 30, 1864 by retreating federal troops.

Along with exploring the church history, the event will shed light on the church’s connection with the black community. According to North Carolina law, we had to have one place for blacks and one for whites. In 1927, sisters from the Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic Church in Scranton, Pennsylvania, came to operate and teach at what would become the Mother of Mercy Catholic School, which was built by blacks in the area. It became the first accredited high school to educate the children of freed slaves.

“That wasn’t a popular thing to do, but they did it,” McDaniel said.

A family in New York heard about what the sisters were doing and provided money to build St. Agnes Chapel in the 1930s. The church closed in the 1940s.

“It’s still there on Market Street,” McDaniels said. “It still stands.”

Mother of Mercy Church was consecrated in 1948 and is across the street from our present church. The building that once housed a school is now a community center.

Mother of Mercy’s best-known student was Sarah Keyes Evans. According to a proclamation signed by Washington Mayor Mac Hodges in 2016, Evans filed a complaint alleging discrimination on interstate buses. In November 1955, the Interstate Commerce Commission ruled in Sarah’s favor, stating that segregation on interstate buses was illegal.

That decision came about a week before Rosa Parks challenged the practice of making blacks sit in the rear of city buses in Montgomery, Alabama. Sarah Keyes Evans was 87 when Hodges signed the proclamation. She was a strong, proud Catholic who faced evil and stared it down with no government help. Sarah did it her way!