Event Details
Join us in celebrating the immigrant history of the South Village with a special talk by Mary Elizabeth Brown, the Center for Migration Studies’ archivist and frequent speaker on Catholic Churches in the Village. We’ll take a look at how the efforts that began with the tightly focused Committee on Catholic Refugees from Germany in the wake of Hitler’s attacks on “non-Aryans” morphed in a multifaceted global Catholic Committee for Refugees after World War II. Being headquartered in the East and West Villages with links to the South Village mattered for being able to raise money and build community for the early trickle of refugees.
At a time when the United States didn’t have refugee visas, but where something needed to be done American bishops created a small committee. A year after Nazi Germany annexed Austria the committee for refugees “from Germany” had to expand their work. By 1940 the committee had a new name, the Catholic Committee for Refuge (CCR). Once the Second World War ended, the CCR focused on international adoptions, including hundreds of Italian immigrant children; and worked with displaced scholars and the resettlement of clergy seeking refuge from World War II and the Cold War. In 1966 the American bishops reorganized their charitable efforts, some of the CCR work concluded.
Village Preservation kicked off its campaign to honor, document, and seek landmark designation for the South Village and its remarkable immigrant and bohemian histories in December of 2006 and completed the effort in December of 2016 with designation of the third and final phase of our proposed South Village Historic District, the largest expansion of landmark protections in the neighborhood since 1969, and among the city’s first and only historic districts to honor immigrant and artistic history. We now celebrate each December as “South Village Month.”
Mary Brown first spoke to a Village Preservation audience in Spring 2005. She works as an archivist at the Center for Migration Studies, a mission of the Scalabrini Fathers, who are also active in the Village at Our Lady of Pompeii parish, and she teaches writing and US history as an adjunct at Marymount Manhattan College. She received her doctorate from Columbia University in 1986. Her dissertation was on Italian Catholic immigrants in the Archdiocese of New York. She also authored the Village Preservation commissioned report and study, The Italians of the South Village.