James Augustine Healy

Who was James Augustine Healy?

James Augustine Healy was the first Roman Catholic priest and the first bishop in the United States of any known African descent. He identified and was accepted as a white Irish American, as he was of majority white ancestry; when he was ordained in 1854, his mixed-race ancestry was not widely known outside his mentors in the Catholic Church. Healy was one of nine mixed-race siblings of the Catholic Healy family of Georgia who survived to adulthood and achieved many "firsts" in United States history.