It was founded in 1916 to provide African-American parishioners of the local St. Mary's Roman Catholic Parish with their own church, freed from the customary restrictions that segregation imposed on them.

Joseph J. Kelly of the Josephites, a mission society founded following the Civil War with a special apostolate in ministry to Black and Native American Catholics.

[3] In accordance with the established rules of contemporary racial division, Black Catholics at St. Mary’s had their own classes, their own catechism, and their own seating area separated from the white congregation.

Thomas Blair, the African-American sexton of Basilica of St. Mary for over thirty years, convened a committee to explore the possibility of establishing a church.

Hannigan, Mr. Blair held meetings at St. Mary's Lyceum with his fellow parishers and drafted a letter to the Bishop Denis J. O’Connell of Richmond asking to form themselves into a new congregation.

[1] The appeal was approved and, despite the fact that African-Americans were among the poorest of residents of Alexandria, Mr. Blair held a variety of fund-raising activities toward the new parish of St. Joseph Catholic Church.

Hannigan also convinced Katherine Drexel, founder of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament and member of a wealthy Philadelphia family, to donate $8,000.

In 1914, the committee was able to purchase property in the historically black neighborhood called Uptown, at the northwest corner of Wythe and North Columbus streets.

In 1967, Richmond Bishop John J. Russell re-designated St. Joseph's from an African-American mission church to a territorial parish within the Roman Catholic Diocese of Arlington in Virginia.

The choice to build within the boundary of the Uptown/Parker-Gray area, like the decisions of other institutions in the same era, is an indication that the neighborhood was quickly becoming the center of the city’s African American community.