Holy Cross Catholic Church and Community
Austin, Travis County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1936, the Reverend Francis R. Weber, CSC, met with African-American Catholics in the home of William M. Tears and celebrated the first Mass for Holy Cross Catholic Church, the first Catholic Church to serve the needs of Austin’s African-Americans. In 1928, the city of Austin laid out a “Negro District,” south of the City Cemetery (Oakwood) in East of East Avenue to encourage Austin’s black citizens to move to that area. By 1932, most African-Americans lived in East Austin. Parishioners constructed the Holy Cross Church building in 1937. In 1942, the church established Holy Family Catholic Church to serve African American Catholics in South Austin. Recognizing the lack of medical facilities to serve African-Americans, the church established Holy Cross Hospital in 1940, the first hospital in Austin to allow black physicians to practice. From a small facility on the church grounds, Holy Cross Hospital moved to a new building on 19th Street, serving the community until 1989. Sister Mary Celine Heitzman, M.D., one of the first Catholic nuns in the US to become a doctor, was the resident physician from 1940 to 1964. The church established Holy Cross Catholic School in 1941 and taught nursery through 8th grade until 1960. The church community significantly supported and guided educational, social, and political issues affecting the city and state, as many of its parishioners served in elected office, including the Texas legislature’s first black Speaker Pro Tem and Austin’s first black School Board member. (2014)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1936 Father Francis R. Weber celebrated the first Mass of Holy Cross, the first Catholic parish to serve Austin's African American community, in the home of William M. Tears—just as the city's 1928 plan pushed Black residents into East Austin. Parishioners built the church in 1937 and went on to found a second parish, a school, and Holy Cross Hospital, the first in Austin to let Black physicians practice, staffed by physician-nun Sister Mary Celine Heitzman. Its members shaped civic and political life, including the first Black speaker pro tem of the Texas Legislature.
Why it matters
Holy Cross shows how a segregated community built its own institutions of worship, healing, education, and political leadership in the face of official exclusion.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the 1930s, Austin was a segregated city, and that segregation was not merely custom but policy. The city's 1928 plan laid out a district east of East Avenue and pushed Black residents toward it by concentrating public services there, so that by 1932 most of Austin's African American citizens lived in East Austin. This is the hard ground on which Holy Cross took root.
Across the American South, segregation shaped every institution, including the church. Where Black Catholics and Protestants alike were unwelcome or unserved in white congregations, they built their own houses of worship, and those churches became far more than places to pray. They were among the few institutions a segregated community fully owned and controlled.
So when African American Catholics gathered in a private home in 1936 to hear their first Mass, they were doing what communities across the country were forced to do: creating, from the ground up, the institutions that a segregated society denied them.
People & events
The parish began in 1936, when Father Francis R. Weber met with African American Catholics in the home of William M. Tears and celebrated the first Mass of Holy Cross, the first Catholic church to serve the needs of Austin's Black community. The following year, in 1937, the parishioners themselves built the church, raising with their own hands the building that would anchor their community.
From that single congregation grew a remarkable web of institutions. In 1940 the church opened Holy Cross Hospital, the first hospital in Austin to allow Black physicians to practice, answering a desperate shortage of medical care for African Americans. Its resident physician from 1940 to 1964 was Sister Mary Celine Heitzman, one of the first Catholic nuns in the United States to become a doctor, who gave nearly a quarter century of healing to the community. A second parish, Holy Family, followed in 1942, and a school, Holy Cross Catholic School, in 1941.
The people of this community did not stop at worship, medicine, and schooling. Parishioners went on to serve in elected office, including the Texas legislature's first Black speaker pro tem and Austin's first Black school board member, carrying the church's influence into the halls of civic and political power.
Its place in the American story
Holy Cross is a local embodiment of one of the central truths of the Black American experience: that a community denied entry to a society's institutions responds by building its own. Worship, healing, education, and political leadership all grew from a single Mass in a private home, a pattern repeated in segregated cities across the nation.
The hospital carries special weight. In a country where Black physicians were routinely barred from practicing and Black patients turned away, an institution that opened its doors to both was a quiet act of resistance and a lifeline. Holy Cross Hospital served its community for decades, and the physician-nun who led it stands among the pioneering women in American medicine.
The story also lays bare the machinery of segregation itself. Austin's 1928 plan is a textbook example of how American cities used planning and public services to enforce racial separation. Holy Cross is what rose in answer, and the arc from a segregated district to a Black speaker pro tem of the Texas Legislature measures both the injustice and the community's power to overcome it.
If you visit
Stand here and read the neighborhood as part of the story. You are in East Austin, the district into which the city's 1928 plan channeled its Black residents, so the very location is a piece of the history the marker records. The church did not simply happen to be here; the community was pushed here, and it built its answer on this ground.
Let the sweep of what grew from one 1936 Mass sink in. From a gathering in a private home came a church raised by its own parishioners, a school, a second parish, and a hospital that welcomed Black doctors and patients when few others would. Few places pack so much determination into so small a footprint.
If you are tracing Austin's civil rights and African American heritage, make this a keystone stop. It is a place that honors not defeat but creation, the way a community met official exclusion by building institutions of faith, healing, learning, and leadership that outlasted the barriers raised against them.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Francis R. Weber
- · William M. Tears
- · Sister Mary Celine Heitzman
Related events
- · Austin's 1928 city plan and East Austin segregation
Themes & tags
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