Thanksgiving week began in mourning for the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago and many black Catholics as news came that the Rev. George H. Clements died on Monday, Nov. 25, 2019. Only the second black priest ordained by the Chicago archdiocese, Rev. Clements had a profound impact on the American Catholic Church, the city of Chicago and countless lives across the country in his more than 60 years of service.

Headlines linked him to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., our touchstone for the civil rights era. But Rev. Clements is better understood as a black Catholic transformed by Black Power, a man who helped create space to be both “authentically Black” and “truly Catholic.”

Certainly, Rev. Clements was present at Dr. King’s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, along with parishioners from St. Dorothy Catholic Church in the Bronzeville neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. He answered Dr. King’s call to march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., for voting rights in 1965. But he was revolutionized by Dr. King’s assassination in 1968.

When asked, “When did you first think of yourself as black and Catholic?” he answered with the clarity of a conversion story. “I can pinpoint the exact moment. April the 4th, 1968, a bullet whizzed through the head of Martin Luther King. I looked in the mirror and I said from now on, I’m gonna be a black man.”

He was not alone. Dr. King’s assassination ignited a decade of activism and institution building known as the Black Catholic Movement. Black nuns, priests and lay people declared the American church a “white racist institution,” experimented with new ways of worship and fought for black self-determination in the pre-dominantly white church.

Rev. Clements was dear friends with the charismatic young revolutionary Fred Hampton and came to be known as the honorary chaplain of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party, headed by Mr. Hampton and Bobby Rush. Rev. Clements helped found the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League, which fought to reform racist policing practices in the Chicago Police Department.

In return, the Black Panthers allied with black and white Catholics in protest when the archbishop refused to promote Rev. Clements to pastor of his predominantly black parish in 1968. Together, they occupied Catholic churches in the middle of Mass, celebrated “Black Unity Masses” and demanded black control of Catholic institutions in black neighborhoods. With their help, Rev. Clements won the pastorate of Holy Angels parish, which he would transform into one of the most prominent parishes in the country.

Rev. Clements’ life story is emblematic of the long history of black Catholics in the United States. His father hailed from Lebanon, Ky., in the state’s “Holy Land” region settled in the 18th century by white and enslaved black Catholics from Maryland. These enslaved black Catholics demonstrated an “uncommon faithfulness,” as the theologian M. Shawn Copeland has put it, maintaining their membership in the church in the face of the violence of enslavement and later segregation inflicted by their white co-religionists.

While Rev. Clements’ father was not especially devout, his grandmother was. When Rev. Clements’ family moved to Chicago in the midst of the Great Migration, the matriarch made it her business to ensure the Clements children kept their family faith, traveling frequently between Kentucky and Chicago to do so. She convinced Rev. Clement’s mother to become Catholic, to baptize her children and to join the vibrant Bronzeville church, Corpus Christi. This was the start of the path that would lead to Rev. Clements’ ordination in 1957.

(In 1945, Rev. Clements became the first African-American to graduate from the Chicago archdiocese’s Archbishop Quigley Preparatory Seminary.)

Ordained before the Second Vatican Council changed so much about church life and identity, and with his own identity forged by the resurgence of late 1960s black nationalism, Rev. Clements cut a complicated figure in a complicated time. He embraced black consciousness but never gave up the more “traditional” pieties of pre-conciliar Catholicism. He incorporated black nationalist politics and aesthetics into his parish, but insisted on many of the same strict rules and regulations for Catholic school families that white priests and nuns had reinforced during his youth.

He repeatedly challenged church authority, frequently getting into fights with his arch- bishop — the first was ignited in 1969 when Holy Angels replaced a shrine to St. Anthony of Padua with one to St. Martin Luther King. Yet Rev. Clements reinforced the patriarchal power of the priesthood again and again throughout his career as well, which we can see in some of the masculinist assumptions that governed leadership in his parish and parochial school.

In August, Rev. Clements was accused of sexually abusing a minor in 1974. The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services has ruled the accusation unfounded, although the archdiocesan investigation remains open. Certainty can be elusive in cases like Rev. Clements’ and may remain so for years to come.

Nevertheless, this accusation, as does any proper recognition of Rev. Clements’ life, calls Catholics to wake up — yes, even as we rightly recognize Rev. Clements’ significance. It calls us to wake up to the fact that black boys and girls have been — and remain — especially vulnerable to abuse and violence at the hands of Catholics, precisely because they’ve been historically marginalized by the church.

It insists that we face the fact that some of the more notorious Catholic abusers in Chicago were black priests, one of whom succeeded Rev. Cle- ments at Holy Angels. The ac- cusation against Rev. Clements may prove to be unfounded. It may not. We may never know one way or the other. But other accusations made by black girls and boys, by black women and men, against both black and white priests, are certainly not.

(Rev. Clements started a program for those addicted to drugs as well as one for incarcerated people and their families.

(“The priesthood is a vocation. But then along the way, one gets avocations, and mine were three: Homelessness, addicts and prisoners,” Rev. Clements told the Chicago Sun-Times in 2017.

(“The Father Clements Story,” a 1987 TV movie starring Louis Gossett Jr., chronicled his life and work.)

What we know about Rev. Clements is that his life resists easy summary. Having founded the One Church-One Child program, which sought to find homes for orphaned black youths, Rev. Clements adopted his first son in 1980, becoming the first U.S. priest to do so. He is survived by his sons Joey, Friday, Stewart and Saint.

He is more figuratively survived by black Catholics across the country, hundreds of whom flew to Chicago in 2017 to cel- ebrate the 60th anniversary of his ordination and to testify to the countless lives he touched. As a white Catholic, I, too, entered the ranks of those count- less lives in interviews, phone calls and letters exchanged in recent years.

On the day Rev. Clements passed away, the Rev. Maurice Nutt, a black priest and theologian, reflected that “Black Catholics owe him a debt of gratitude for his prophetic voice and radical discipleship.”

The writer is an assistant professor of religious studies at the College of Charleston and author of “Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the United States.”