“Race to Sainthood” examines lay efforts to canonize the first African American saint in the Roman Catholic tradition and the black discursive and aesthetic practices that have emerged from them. Riffing on the genre of “lives of saints” writing, each chapter analyzes practices of storytelling clustered around Black Americans on the official path to canonization by the Vatican. I assemble what I call “colloquial hagiographies,” or the informal biographies of potential saints, which are generated in the rapport between the unofficial, vernacular, lived religion shared in everyday conversations and the official hagiographical accounts promoted by the Church. I argue that aesthetics associated with life storytelling reveal a distinctly Catholic grammar of race that is embedded in spaces traditionally seen as secular. Ultimately, “Race to Sainthood” demonstrates how a Catholic imaginary of race materializes for public display and consumption in American culture.