Joseph Oliver Bowers, native of Dominica, B.W.I., went to St. Augustine's Seminary at Bay St. Louis, Miss, in 1928 because it was then the only Roman Catholic seminary in the U.S. that would accept Negroes. He studied for eleven years, there and in Wisconsin and Rome, then went to Accra on the Gold Coast as a missionary, where he learned three Gold Coast dialects to add to his fluent French and Latin and his working knowledge of Italian and German. With a year and a half off to become a licentiate in canon law, he stayed on in Africa for twelve years.
Last week Father Bowers, 43, was back in Bay St. Louis. At the Church of Our
Lady of the Gulf, New York's Cardinal Spellman consecrated him a bishop, in the first Roman Catholic consecration of a Negro ever to take place in the U.S. Whites and Negroes sat together during the ceremony and mingled in the yard outside.
Bishop Bowers will return this summer to his Accra diocese (pop. 1,311,000), where the number of Catholics has risen in the last 14 years from 12,333 to 33,800. But before he goes back to Africa he will visit Bay St. Louis again, to ordain two Negro priests. That will be another first for St. Augustine's Seminary: the first time in the church's U.S. history that Negro seminarians have ever been ordained by a Negro bishop.