Elizabeth Clarisse Lange was born in Saint-Domingue about 1789, carried to Cuba by the revolution, educated there, and settled in Baltimore by 1813 among the French-speaking refugees of the Caribbean. She found the city's Black children had no school, and about 1818 she opened one in her own house in Fells Point, at her own expense, for eleven years, in a slave state where teaching Black children was at best unwelcome.
In 1828 a Sulpician priest, James Hector Joubert, proposed what nobody had managed: a religious congregation of Black women. On 2 July 1829 Lange and three companions made their first vows as the Oblate Sisters of Providence — the first enduring community of women religious of African descent in the history of the United States. They were insulted in the street in their habits and their existence was questioned by clergy after Joubert died, and they continued.
They took in orphans, taught, and when cholera came to Baltimore in 1832 the city asked for nurses and the sisters volunteered; several went into the almshouse to nurse the dying. Mother Mary Lange led them for most of her life and died on 3 February 1882, very old. Her school, St Frances Academy, has been open since 1828 and is still open, which makes it the oldest continuously operating school for Black Catholic children in the country. Pope Francis declared her Venerable on 22 June 2023.