Venerable Mary Elizabeth Lange

Mary Elizabeth Lange, OSP (born Elizabeth Clarisse Lange; c. 1789 – February 3, 1882) was an American religious sister in Baltimore, Maryland who founded the Oblate Sisters of Providence in 1829, the first African-American religious congregation in the United States. She was also, via the Oblates, the first African-American superior general. The cause for her beatification was opened in 1991. Pope Francis named her as venerable on June 22, 2023. Lange was born in Saint-Domingue about 1789. It is said that her mother, Annette Lange, was the daughter of a Jewish plantation owner and an enslaved African woman. Her father, Clovis, was said to be an enslaved mulatto man on the same plantation. During the Haitian Revolution, her parents escaped and took the family to Cuba, settling in Santiago de Cuba. There Lange received an excellent education. She left Cuba in the early 1800s and immigrated to the United States. According to oral tradition of the Oblate Sisters of Providence, Lange landed in Charleston, South Carolina. She traveled next to Norfolk, Virginia, and finally settled in Baltimore, Maryland by 1813. Baltimore had a large population of free people of color, who already outnumbered the city's enslaved population. Among the free people were numerous French-speaking Afro-Caribbean people who had also fled the revolution in Haiti. In the early 1800s, various Protestant organizations in Baltimore, such as Sharp Street Methodist Episcopal Church's Free African School (1802), Daniel Coker's Bethel Charity School (c. 1812), St. James Protestant Episcopal Day School (1824), and William Lively's Union Seminary (1825), created schools for African-American students. While providing a valuable service, they could not meet the demands of Baltimore's growing free African-American population. Lange recognized the need for education for African-American children and opened a school for them in her home in the Fells Point area of the city in 1818.