Brady recounts his early life as a Catholic priest fighting for civil rights in this memoir.

The author was in the thick of the 1960s American civil rights struggle as an activist Catholic priest serving largely Black parishes in New Jersey. Brady participated in Southern voting rights drives, earning death threats below the Mason-Dixon Line and an enduring friendship with the King family, particularly with King’s wife, Coretta. Father Brady subsequently assumed roles as a parish priest in New Jersey, in the towns of Orange and the more upscale Montclair. The change of scenery in the North gave Brady no respite from seeing racially motivated ugliness and hatred. He writes of police routinely brutalizing and even murdering people of color and charges that, in the riots following King’s assassination in 1968, one Black teen killed by law enforcement in Newark, New Jersey, had been a bystander cajoled by a LIFE magazine photojournalist to feign looting a liquor store for a photo op. Ostensibly a tonier and more affluent environment, Montclair still subjected its Black citizens to segregation—particularly students, who were given inferior classroom resources, program cuts, and meager opportunities for advancement. Following King’s Gandhi-inspired strategy of a nonviolent pursuit of social justice, Brady participated in sit-in protests in schools; he writes that supervising clerical authorities would advise “Do whatever your conscience tells you” in these matters so as not to impede him. Father Brady also took active roles in sports coaching for the young Black congregants of Montclair’s St. Peter Claver Church, and he established a groundbreaking all-Black cheerleading drill team, the Soul Stompers. The precision squad won national championships, performed at Disney World and the Indianapolis 500, received a letter of congratulations from President Richard Nixon, and won the affection of a broad populace. “I am convinced that the Soul Stompers did more to unite the Black and White citizens of the community than anyone might have ever anticipated,” Brady states.

Brady recalls that emotional era in plain language, generally in chronological order but occasionally jumping back and forth in time. The book includes news article reprints, photos, and letters illustrating the criticism (and threats) that Brady endured and also abundant praise and respect from Black leaders he received over the following decades. The narrative does not come across as the self-aggrandizing testimony of a liberal progressive savior; rather, Brady pays tribute to the vital partnerships he formed with his “soul brother,” the late Clinton Taylor Jr., and Soul Stompers Delma and Wanda Wormley. He emphasizes the examples set by Dr. King and Coretta (not to mention Jesus Christ and God) that gave the young priest strength to face and pray for his enemies (Brady later learned that a group of “militant-looking” Black men were secretly lending protection to him as well). Some may wish that Brady had commented on later, ongoing racial strife in the Black Lives Matter era, though his truths here remain self-evident.

A former Catholic priest's flashback to civil-rights tumult, triumph and the sacred.