Sister Larretta: Prophet for Racial Justice

Born in 1954 to Larry Lee Williams and Elizabeth Rivera in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Larretta was named for her broadcast-journalist father, who signed on to one of the first African American radio stations in the country.

Her parents divorced when Larretta was three, and her mother eventually remarried, to Lester Ervin, who served as North Carolina’s first Black fire chief. Young Larretta and her siblings from her mom’s second marriage grew up financially comfortable in a segregated neighborhood. Educated in Catholic schools, Larretta first wondered if she might have a vocation to religious life when a Sister of St. Joseph at her high school suggested she could.

A prospective students’ weekend at the former Sacred Heart College (now part of Belmont Abbey College) in Belmont, North Carolina, led Larretta to the Sisters of Mercy. She stayed in a dorm where Sister Pauline Clifford (d. 2009) lived. Some students invited Larretta to join them in Sister Pauline’s suite for Frosted Flakes and cartoons. “I’d never seen a sister out of habit. It seemed so real, and everyone was so happy. I knew this was where I wanted to be.”

Her call to religious life grew in college, fostered partly by some friends who also believed that they were being called to become Sisters of Mercy. But her mother’s hesitation about her entering the convent led her to wait for a few years. “I didn’t want to do anything that didn’t have the full support of my mother,” she says.

After college, Larretta worked at a TV station and the radio station where her dad had been, and as a religion teacher at her former high school before entering the Sisters of Mercy at age 28.

She was unprepared for racism at the convent. Time and again Larretta encountered racial slurs and off-color jokes—what today are referred to as microaggressions. She regrets not being more upfront about what she was experiencing “instead of letting other sisters tell me I was having a problem with authority, or that I was just too sensitive!”

“But when you are young and you’re the only Black woman and you’ve entered an all-white community, you kind of take it,” says Sister Larretta sadly. “I would hear things like, ‘If you’re going to be here, then you’re going to have to get used to it.’”

“I would call home crying, and my mother would say, ‘Remember, you can always come home, but you are where you feel God wants you to be, and, if that is true, you will be able to stay there. But remember, they are women first, nuns second.’ That’s what got me through; the reality of their humanity.”

When it was time for Sister Larretta to make perpetual or final vows in 1990, sisters overseeing the process decided that she wasn’t ready—that she should wait another year. When she asked why the only reason given was “to learn humility,” according to Sister Larretta. One of the sisters put a note about the decision under her door and told her, “Well, at least we didn’t ask you to leave.”

Sister Larretta adds, “I was not certain how a ninth year of much of the same [experiences] with the same people would change how they would accept me or how I would continue to receive negative encounters. I was certain, however, that the grace of humility had gotten me this far; to gain more within a year would simply be gift.”

In the years that followed, Sister Larretta taught high school, served as a pastoral associate, worked at Wake Forest University Divinity School as a chaplain and educator, and held an administrative job at Catholic Charities. In 2013, she became coordinator of pastoral care at St. Leo the Great Catholic Church in Winston-Salem, where she cares for parishioners who are ill or dying and for their grieving families.

Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1994, Sister Larretta is also a member of the parish support group that she co-facilitates for people living with chronic or severe illness. “So now I’m not only facilitating the group, but it’s a support group for me too,” she says, noting that her disorder is a moderate one. “It has helped me to make more connections with people in the parish.”

Most weekends, for community life, Sister Larretta drives to Sacred Heart Convent in Belmont, something she began doing when her mom lived with the sisters at the convent’s Marian Center during the last three years of her life. She has experienced emotional healing in recent years, thanks to a former leadership sister and some sisters in Belmont and beyond who listened to her stories.

“I give [them] a lot of credit,” says Sister Larretta. “They didn’t tell me, ‘Oh, you know, that's just how Sister is. She’s from this state or that state [in the South] or that's just how she was raised. Or she is older and that’s just how it was when she was growing up.”

She is grateful for these sisters’ prayers and support, as well as for the Sisters of Mercy’s commitment to the critical concern of racism.

“Dismantling racism will be an ongoing challenge for Mercy, but a necessary one if we are going to move ahead with the signs of the time, claim interculturality, protest against any injustice, and expect to be seen as people of justice, mercy, and the love of Christ,” Sister Larretta says.

After seeing the 2015 documentary #BlackLivesMatter, she wrote about it for Global Sisters Report, a project of the National Catholic Reporter. She continues to bring her perspective as a Black woman and a religious sister to columns about race, faith and American culture.

Additionally, Sister Larretta draws sustenance from playwriting and directing, from abstract drawing that is rooted in prayer, and from her relationship with the Divine.

“My hope comes from a Source deep within that was nurtured long before religious life,” she reflects. “It’s an emotion or presence that I sense. The last 40 years as a Sister of Mercy have only magnified and strengthened that inner Source which is God.”

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