Augustus Tolton was born a slave in Missouri in 1854 and baptised a Catholic. His father went to the Union army; in 1863 his mother took him and his brother and sister across the Mississippi in a rowboat under fire, and they settled in Quincy, Illinois, free. A parish priest there saw what he was and taught him, against the objections of the parish.
Every seminary in the United States refused him, and so did the Mill Hill Missionaries in London. Rome did not. He studied at the Urban College of the Propaganda and was ordained in the Archbasilica of St John Lateran on 24 April 1886, at thirty-one, expecting to be sent to Africa. He was sent back to America instead, and told that the country needed him more. He said Mass for the first time at the altar of St Peter's.
He went home to Quincy and then, after years of being undermined by a fellow priest who resented his congregation, to Chicago, where he gathered a Black parish and built St Monica's out of donated money, brick by brick as it came in. He was a good preacher and the churches he spoke in filled. On 8 July 1897, walking home in a heat wave that killed scores in the city, he collapsed; he died the next day at thirty-three. He asked to be buried in Quincy, among the priests who had taught him, and he is. Pope Francis declared him Venerable on 12 June 2019.