matthew j cressler.
"what are you going to do?"
cohort. 2023-24
project. “What Are You Going To Do?”: A Bad Catholics, Good Trouble© Webcomic*
location. Charleston, SC
medium. visual arts
My project as a Crossroads Community Stories Fellow is a webcomic story based on the life of Arthur Cecil McFarland (b. 1947). Arthur is a native of Charleston, South Carolina who served as a municipal court judge for the city as well as the supreme knight of the Knights of Peter Claver and co-president of the Charleston Area Justice Ministry (CAJM). He is a leader in both the local and national Black Catholic community. And I have been blessed to call him my friend. But how did we come to coauthor a webcomic?
Well, what would a comic be without a good origin story?
2019.
In October 2019, I sat down for dinner at a community listening session hosted by the Black Catholic Theological Symposium (BCTS). As a white historian of Black Catholicism, I am an affiliate BCTS member. That year I helped host our annual meeting at the College of Charleston, where I worked for almost a decade. When I sat down to dine that evening, I took a seat next to Judge McFarland, as many still affectionately call him. This was, definitively, a big deal for me. (One might say I “fan-girled” out a bit.) You see, back then I mainly knew Arthur from afar. He was one of the foremost leaders of CAJM (pronounced KAY-jum); the interreligious, interracial grassroots justice organization of which I was also a member. I relished the chance to get to know him a bit better. And over the course of that meal, as he shared story after story from his eventful life, my historian’s jaw dropped to the floor. He’d converted to Catholicism as a student at a school run by the Oblate Sisters of Providence...before desegregating Charleston’s white Catholic high school. He’d been arrested in the Charleston movement sit-ins…then traveled to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. He went to college at the University of Notre Dame…where he helped lead Black Power protests on campus. I didn’t know when I’d do it or what it would become, but that day I vowed to interview this amazing man!
2023.
Four years passed before I pitched the wild idea that we write a webcomic together. By this point I had launched Bad Catholics, Good Trouble. BC/GT brings to vivid life true stories of Catholic injustice and the ordinary people of faith who did extraordinary things to confront white supremacy and colonial violence in their communities in a webcomic format suitable for all ages. The project was born of a beautiful coming together. I aspired to translate my scholarship on white Catholic racism into a medium that could reach ordinary Catholics and, around the same time, embarked on my first creative collaboration with artist Marcus Jimenez of Dauntless Stories. Our first webcomic centered on Sr. Angelica Schultz, the nun hit in the head by a brick while marching for open housing in Chicago in 1966. Sr. Angelica’s niece and grandniece, Judith and Jennifer Daubenmier, joined me as coauthors as the script developed and Dr. Megan Goodwin graciously agreed to design a website that would showcase our work. All of which (incredibly!) was made possible by a Luce-AAR Advancing Public Scholarship grant.
bad catholics, good trouble.
“Bad Catholics, Good Trouble” plays on the double meaning of the words. Some Catholics fight to maintain an unjust status quo in their neighborhoods, in their parishes, and in the Church. Others have taken feet to the streets and bricks to the head in struggles for social justice. Both have been labeled “bad” and both invite us to consider what it means to be “good” or “bad” Catholics in the first place. “Trouble” is a tricky word too. People who fight for social justice are often labeled rabble-rousers, law-breakers, and trouble-makers. Yet, as the late great freedom fighter John Lewis liked to say, it can be right and good to stir up “good trouble, necessary trouble.” It was important to me, as a white Catholic scholar, that our first BC/GT story address itself forthrightly to histories of white Catholic racism. It was also crucial to me that it offer white Catholics an alternative way of being in the world, especially since young readers were a primary audience. For similar reasons, I knew our second webcomic needed to center Black Catholics. It would still highlight white Catholic racism and offer models for racial justice, but it would do so by telling an unfamiliar tale: a Catholic story that starts in the heart of the Jim Crow South and culminates with a Black revolution on the quintessential Catholic college campus. In a word, Arthur’s story. And the Crossroads Project made our dreams a reality!
judge arthur c. mcfarland.
Our work began with oral history interviews at Arthur’s law office in Charleston in the summer of 2023. There, Arthur shared memories of his mother and father, Thomasina and Joe McFarland. There, Arthur shared memories of his mother and father, Thomasina and Joe McFarland.
Family Photo (colorized): Thomasina and Joe McFarland's 25th Wedding Anniversary (1958). Joe (father) stands in the center wearing a bow-tie. Thomasina stands in a white dress beside him. Joe (Arthur’s brother, age 23) is seated, center front. Arthur (11) stands smiling in a suit and tie next to him. (Courtesy Arthur C. McFarland)
His mother had a particularly profound impact on his life. Thomasina was a force to be reckoned with: mother of nine and a seamstress and a political organizer who organized the tenants of their public housing project, the Wragg Borough Homes! “If there was anybody who planned my life,” as Arthur put it in our first interview, “not only influenced but planned it,” it was her. “[S]he firmly believed that our faith would keep us on the right path.” Arthur told stories of his eldest brother, Joe, who gave him a political education. Joe, who had survived polio as a young boy, served as a griot of sorts for the Jim Crow Charleston community, running a newsstand for national Black magazines and periodicals. These were just two of the many characters Arthur introduced to me in the course of our conversations. We recorded over four hours of interviews that summer, spanning his upbringing in Charleston; his college career at Notre Dame and then law school at the University of Virginia; his time at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in Harlem, New York; and then, finally, his return to Charleston where he served as municipal court judge for thirty-three years and later helped found and lead CAJM.
As you might imagine, a lifetime like Arthur’s contains far too many stories for a single webcomic (certainly a 20-page one like ours). Thus, it was not simply a matter of transcribing interviews and sending them off to Marcus for illustration. We had to identify a story — a compelling narrative with a clear thesis, protagonists and antagonists, conflict and action, etc. As we shifted from research to storytelling, a clear throughline emerged. Arthur had been forged in Black Charleston in the era of Jim Crow segregation, educated not only by his mother and brother but also by the historic Mother Emanuel A.M.E. community (his family’s home church) and the Oblate Sisters of Providence (the Black order of women religious who ran his school). What happened when this young Black Catholic man — forged by these communities with an activist’s spirit — went north to Notre Dame at the height of the civil rights era?
oral history to webcomic.
Well, you’ll just have to read the webcomic to find out! We don’t want to spoil the fun for you, after all. What we can share with you here, though, is what it looks like to move from an oral history interview to a comic book script to webcomic page.
The ultimate aspiration for Bad Catholics, Good Trouble is that it be a space for lots of creators — not just me and Marcus, but other scholars, artists, and community members — to share creative renderings of Catholic history that invite us to consider our communal, institutional complicity in histories of violence, and also offer life-giving ways out of those histories and toward beloved community. We hope you enjoy our second story, Arthur’s story, titled “What Are You Going To Do?” And we hope it inspires you in your own life’s work, and perhaps even leads you to tell stories of your own.
gratitude.
This webcomic was funded by a Community Stories Fellows Grant from The Crossroads Project, a collaborative research initiative directed by Judith Weisenfeld, Anthea Butler, and Lerone Martin and supported by the Henry Luce Foundation and Princeton University.
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Citation: Cressler, Matthew J. ““What Are You Going To Do?”: A Bad Catholics, Good Trouble© Webcomic." SPIRIT HOUSE: A Crossroads Project. July 2024. Date Accessed. https://www.crossroads-spirithouse.org/cressler.