How have black Americans used Roman Catholicism to articulate a tradition of dissent against overlapping hegemonies of religion and race? How have African Americans worked within Catholic institutions to reform exclusionary practices without further alienating themselves from their communities, or diminishing the tradition that they love? My dissertation, "Black Revolutionary Saints: Roman Catholicism & the U.S. Racial Imagination" examines black discursive and aesthetic practices of sainthood to understand how a Catholic imaginary of race materializes for public display and consumption in American culture. I explore cultural moments when celebrity secular sainthood and Roman Catholic saint-making overlap to reveal a distinctly Catholic grammar of race. In the work of Catholic artists Mary Lou Williams, Claude McKay and Toni Morrison, black Catholic aesthetics as practices of racial and religious self-making reveal how black Catholicism has been rendered “invisible” within existing scripts for interpreting race and religion in the United States. Each chapter analyzes the practices of storytelling clustered around the 6 African American Catholics on the official path to canonization in the Roman Catholic Church. I argue that the life stories of black Catholics—hagiographies, biographies, autobiographies—become a battle ground for making decisions about the possibilities for black leadership and recognition in the Church.