Cowboys and Nuns of Color: A TV Depiction

During last summer, I awoke from a vacation mid-morning nap to find three African American nuns on the bedroom television screen in an episode of the TV western, “Gunsmoke”.   I was watching the TVLand channel when I dozed off and wondered if I were still asleep when I saw Black nuns in Marshall Matt Dillon’s Dodge City.   I awoke too late to hear them identify themselves but upon viewing the episode months later, I saw them proclaim “We’re the Oblate Sisters of Providence” but I was not surprised.  They looked like Oblates and acted like Oblates in that one hour, black and white episode of the longest running dramatic series on network television. 

The episode of Gunsmoke, to which I am referring, aired for the first time on Saturday, December 29, 1969.  It was entitled, “The Sisters” and was the fourteenth episode of the show’s fifteenth season.  The series began on September 10, 1955 and ran until September 1, 1975 on CBS.  Over those twenty years, 633 episodes were broadcast, 233 were half hour versions and the other 400 were a full hour.  Also, as readers will recall, shows were broadcast originally in black and white and later they all ran in color.

The plot of the “The Sisters”, an episode, you will note, broadcast four days after Christmas Day and the year after the assassination of Martin Luther King, had some basis in reality.  The three Oblate Sisters announce that they are on their way to Kansas to start an orphanage.  The mother of two white children, ironically enough, dies in the beginning of the show and the Sisters decide to take the young ones to their father in Dodge City in Kansas in the direction of where they were headed.  When they encounter the father (played skillfully by actor Jack Elam) he is abusive of the children and the nuns, calling the Sisters racist names and questioning their fitness to be religious.   Eventually, the house, where the Sisters have temporarily homesteaded and which is owned by Elam’s character, catches fire.  At that moment just Elam and the Mother Superior are trapped inside.  He panics and becomes immobilized as the flames are growing and approaching them.  The Oblate is trying to move barricades without his help and with limited success.  My favorite exchange in the episode is when the Superior slaps the Elam character in the face to try to bring him out of his hysteria.   The slap works because it is bold not unlike the depiction itself of such an unusual racial interaction nearly four decades ago.   The scene was reminiscent of Sidney Poitier’s Detective Virgil Tibbs’ slapping the wealthy industrialist in the film, “In the Heat of the Night” released a couple of years earlier.  Both scenes raised the black characters to the level of equals to their white counterparts and thereby saying subtly “The times they were a’changin’”.

The Oblate Sisters did found a couple of orphanages in Leavenworth, Kansas back in the 19th century.  As I understand it, the one for boys was called Guardian Angel, while the one for girls was named Holy Epiphany.  At the end of the episode depicting the Sisters, Marshall Dillon awards the two abused children to the care of the three Sisters.  It is an historic fact that while the Oblates have been dedicated primarily to children of color, they have worked with all persons in need whenever presented to them. 

Finally, the Oblate Sisters were never informed or consulted before the episode aired.  Mother Mary Good Counsel was the Superior at that time.  After talking to a number of Oblates I understand, the TV show’s producer, British born Philip Leacock didn’t pick up the phone to call the Oblates with the news that their order would be featured in a highly rated television show.  Interesting…

Respectfully submitted,

Ralph E. Moore, Jr.

April 22, 2007

This article appeared in The Catholic Review on May 10, 2007.