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Elizabeth Louise Ebo, often called “Betty” or “Betty Lou,” was born on April 10, 1924, in Bloomington, Illinois, last of three children. When her mother died, and father was unemployed during the Depression, Betty and her two older siblings lived in the McLean County Home for Colored Children in Bloomington from 1930 to 1942. As a child, she was hospitalized for long periods of time, once for an infected thumb that needed to be amputated, and another time for tuberculosis.
In December of 1942, Betty became a Catholic Christian. So, in her late teens, Betty applied to several Catholic nursing schools, but she was continually rejected because of her race. At the time, most nursing schools in the United States refused to accept Black applicants and men as students. Fortunately, however, she was accepted at St. Mary’s Infirmary School of Nursing in St. Louis run by the Sisters of St. Mary.
After graduating from nursing school, Betty sought to become a religious sister. Though there were a few religious orders that took only Black women, Betty wanted to join the Sisters of St. Mary. When she learned that the group was considering changing their “whites-only” stance, she waited until the change was made. In 1946, Betty became one of the first Black women to enter the Sisters of St. Mary and received the name Sister Mary Antona. She professed her final vows in 1954. (In 1987, the order would merge with the Sisters of St. Francis of Maryville, Maryland to become known today as the Franciscan Sisters of Mary (F.S.M.).
In religious life, Sister Antona, like the other Black sisters, encountered not only prejudice, but also discrimination on the part of the other sisters. Sister Antona, however, did not let this drive her away.
In addition to practicing nursing, Sister Antona earned a bachelor’s degree in medical records, a master’s in the theology of health care, and from 1979, she held a chaplain’s certificate from the National Association of Catholic Chaplains.
Sister Antona held a variety of hospital jobs from the middle 1950s to 1992, when she became a pastoral associate at St. Nicholas parish in St. Louis. One of Sister Antona’s most notable accomplishments was becoming head of St. Clare’s Hospital in Baraboo, Wisconsin, the first Black woman to become head of a Catholic hospital in the United States.
But Sister Antona didn’t only devote herself to nursing and academia. Rather, she threw herself into the civil rights movement of the 1960s that was fighting for equal treatment for all Americans, regardless of skin color or racial background. For example, on March 10, 1965, Sister Antona marched in Selma, Alabama with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., just days after Alabama state troopers assaulted demonstrators with club and tear gas who were marching peacefully for equal voting rights. It was at the march with Martin Luther King that Sister Antona said, “I’m here because I’m a Negro, a nun, a Catholic, and because I want to bear witness.”
In 2007, the march in which Sister Antona participated was made into a documentary about the Selma march and the religious women who participated: “Sisters of Selma: Bearing Witness for Change.”
Sister Antona was also a founding member of the National Black Sisters’ Conference and president of the conference from 1980 – 1982.
Sister Mary Antona Ebo died on November 11, 2017in St. Louis, Missouri.
