Page 10 - Augustine Catholic News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

NEW ORLEANS —  As a frigid dawn broke here on Fat Tuesday — better known as Mardi Gras — the streets of Treme were unusually hushed. No skeletons tromped through the historically Black neighborhood pounding on drums and knocking on doors to wake up residents and warn them of their mortality, a ritual that its practitioners say dates to 1819. As a trickle of locals and tourists approached the Backstreet Cultural Museum, a tiny treasure trove of Black culture that is an early gathering point for the Northside Skull and Bone Gang, they found the front door shut and the lights off. “No...

Photograph of St. Augustine Catholic Church, circa 1899. (Source: Library of Congress). In 1946, two attorneys finalized their purchase of a historic church building in the heart of Washington. [1] For seventy years, Saint Augustine Catholic Church at 15 th and L was the place where the Black Catholics of the District were baptized, educated, given communion, and buried. In two years, it would be rubble. At its founding in 1858, the church then known as Blessed Martin de Porres established the first school for Black children in the District of Columbia. [2] Operating out of the basement of...