James Augustine Healy

James Augustine Healy (April 6, 1830 – August 5, 1900) was the first African-American Roman Catholic priest and the first African-American Roman Catholic bishop in the United States. 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. (Augustus Tolton, a former slave who was publicly known to be black when ordained in 1886, is therefore sometimes credited as the first black Catholic priest in the U.S.) 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.