¹ Beckwith's account is related in Josephine Beckwith, Home Missionary, 1940–1977, interview with the author, cassette tape recording (Fort Worth, Tex., 2005) and in History Task Force, Committee on Deaconess Service National Program Division General Board of Global Ministries, The United Methodist Church, The Joy of Service: Life Stories of Racial and Ethnic Minority Deaconesses and Home Missionaries (n.p., 1992), 8. To date, no documentary evidence has been found to support Beckwith's contention regarding litigation.

² Cobb, Alice, Yes Lord, I'll Do It: Scarritt's Century of Service (Nashville: Scarritt College, 1987), 76Google Scholar.

³ Information on Pearl Bellinger's and Ellen Barnette's terms of missionary service can be found in Missionary Correspondence Files, 1955–61 (General Commission on Archives and History, Madison, New Jersey), General Board of Global Ministries. See especially, letter dated September 10, 1953 for Bellinger's cited account.

⁴ Most notable here are, Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jesse Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks, Righteous Discontent: The Woman's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press: 1993)Google Scholar; and Gilmore, Glenda, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1925 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press: 1996)Google Scholar. More recently, Thomas’, Bettye CollierJesus, Jobs, and Justice: African American Women and Religion (New York: Random House, 2010)Google Scholar covers a more expansive time frame; however, the breadth of its scope renders close attention to the more quotidian work of missionaries next to impossible.

⁵ See eds. Crawford, Vicki L., Rouse, Jacquelyn Anne, Woods, Betty, Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941–1965 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990)Google Scholar. The quote from Charles Payne is the title of his essay in this volume. Other examples of this dominant trajectory included: Collier-Thomas, Bettye and Franklin, Vincent P., eds., Sisters in the Struggle: Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Olson, Lynne, Freedoms Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830–1970 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001)Google Scholar. Biographies of women leaders include: Lee, Chana Kai, For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Ransby, Barbara, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003)Google Scholar; and Charron, Katherine Mellon, Freedom's Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also, Marsh, Charles, God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999)Google Scholar and Ross, Rosetta E., Witnessing and Testifying: Black Women, Religion and Civil Rights (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2003)Google Scholar as notable exceptions in their analysis of faith and theological understandings as formative to racial attitudes and social activism. Anthea Butler's recent Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making a Sanctified World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007)Google Scholar stands out in the historiography of black American women in the twentieth century as its focus is the development of the women's organization in this Pentecostal tradition and not their role in civil rights leadership or activism. However, for members of this sectarian tradition, as Butler points out, the struggle centered on negotiating gendered leadership roles and participation beyond the boundaries of the sect.

⁶ See Hutchison, William R., Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)Google Scholar, chapter 6 for the standard narrative of American missions impulse and its decline. See also, Wacker, Grant, “Second Thoughts on the Great Commission: Liberal Protestants and Foreign Missions, 1890–1940” in Earthen Vessels: American Evangelicals and Foreign Missions, 1880–1980, eds. Carpenter, Joel A. and Shenk, Wilbert R. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 281–300Google Scholar. Dana Robert offers the most thorough analysis of women's mission history and theory and the decline of their influence due to consolidation moves by male-dominated church boards. See her American Women in Mission: A History of Their Thought and Practice. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1996)Google Scholar, chapter 6.

⁷ For a study of the consultative process leading to the formation of the Methodist Church see, Davis, Morris L., The Methodist Unification: Christianity and the Politics of Race in the Jim Crow Era (New York: New York University Press, 2008)Google Scholar. For discussion of the denomination's confrontations with segregation during the era of its segregated structure see Murray, Peter C., Methodists and the Crucible of Race, 1930–1975 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004)Google Scholar. Both provide informative analyses of the denomination's cultural compromise with race, yet neither considers Methodist women's contributions to the debates.

⁸ Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past” in The Journal of American History 91 (March 2005), 1233–1263CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ Gilkes, Cheryl Townsend, “Exploring the Religious Connection: Black Women Community Workers, Religious Agency and the Force of Faith,” in Women and Religion in the African Diaspora: Knowledge, Power and Performance, eds. Griffith, R. Marie and Savage, Barbara Dianne (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 180Google Scholar. Also important here is Nasstrom's, Kathryn L. “Down to Now: Memory, Narrative, and Women's Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement in Atlanta, Georgia,” Gender and History 11, no.1 (April 1999), 113–144CrossRefGoogle Scholar, argues for the importance of local histories in uncovering women's organizing leadership. Similarly, Dennis Dickerson's article, “Theologizing Rosa Parks,” The AME Church Review 124, no. 411 (July-September 2008)Google Scholar is influencing my thought here. In line with Gilkes, Dickerson asserts that Parks’s religiosity must be considered when examining her political activism. As a lifetime member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, says Dickerson, Rosa Parks’s civil rights activism would have been informed by her belief in spiritual and social holiness, a key theological principal of the Methodist traditions.

¹⁰ Jeffrey Cox names these gaps in power between missionaries and indigenous Christians as “imperial fault lines,” disparities that plagued the missionary enterprise despite the best efforts of white missionaries. Cox, Jeffrey, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

¹¹ See Robert, DanaAmerican Women in Mission and “Introduction: Historical Themes and Current Issues” in Gospel Bearers, Gender Barriers: Missionary Women in the Twentieth Century. (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2002), 1–30Google Scholar especially for a thoroughgoing analysis of American women's theories of missions. Robert's, “The First Globalization: The Internationalization of the Protestant Missionary Movement Between the World Wars,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 26, no. 2 (April 2002): 1–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar adds further illumination. Soper, Edmund, The Philosophy of the Christian World Mission. (Nashville: Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1943)Google Scholar supplies a contemporary account of mission theory during World War II while Yates, Timothy, Christian Mission in the Twentieth Century. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)Google Scholar gives a thorough treatment to the progression of the world mission movement, however, this is an institutional history and hence is exclusive of the women's mission movement. Warren, Heather, Theologians of a New World Order: Reinhold Niebuhr and the Christian Realists, 1920–1948 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar lends insight to the quest to implement the new world order.

¹² “The Second Assembly Woman's Society of Christian Service,” Methodist Woman, (June 1946), 7.

¹³ Women's Society of Christian Service, Minutes, Annual Meeting of the Women's Society of Christian Service, Central Jurisdiction, 1940–1951 (General Commission on Archives and History, The United Methodist Church, Madison, New Jersey), General Board of Global Ministries, Women's Division.

¹⁴ The Lexington Conference of the Central Jurisdiction covered part or all of the following states: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois, and Indiana.

¹⁵ Minutes, Women's Society of Christian Service, 1941.

¹⁶ See Yates, Christian Mission, 137–155, especially his discussion of missiologists, Max Warren, Stephen Neill, and Kenneth Cragg for a helpful review of “unveiling” Christ in other faiths.

¹⁷ Both Dana Robert and Heather Warren make note of the missionary experiences of some of the strongest proponents of the WCC and the UN. See Robert, “First Globalization”; Warren, Heather A., Theologians of a New World Order. Reinhold Niebuhr and the Christian Realists, 1920–1948 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar, especially chapter 2.

¹⁸ Rosenberg, Jonathan, How Far the Promised Land? World Affairs and the American Civil Rights Movement from the First World War to Vietnam (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 5–6Google Scholar. While Rosenberg argues that this connection maintains throughout the 1950s, Eschen, Peggy von in Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997)Google Scholar, argues that black Americans disconnected the battle for Civil Rights from a critique of imperialism during the height of the Cold War and McCarthyism.

¹⁹ Minutes, Woman's Society of Christian Service, 1941.

²⁰ Ibid.

²¹ Ibid.

²² Hanson, Joyce, Mary McLeod Bethune and Black Women's Political Activism (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 123Google Scholar.

²³ Minutes, Women's Society of Christian Service, 1944.

²⁴ Ibid., 1947.

²⁵ “Missions in America,” World Outlook 29, no. 9 (September 1939): 3Google Scholar.

²⁶ (emphasis added) Minutes, Women's Society of Christian Service, 1940.

²⁷ Louise Young, (“Unification and Race Relations” World Outlook 27 [June 1937], 29–30) encouraged work across racial lines. Fashioning social relations along “the Christian pattern” was common parlance for anti-segregationists at this time and is the meaning behind the quote from “Missions in America.”

²⁸ Quoted in Loupe, Diane E., “Storming and Defending the Color Barrier at the School of Journalism: The Lucile Bluford Case,” Journalism History 16, no. 1–2 (Spring/Summer 1989): 22Google Scholar.

²⁹ Josephine Beckwith, Home Missionary, 1940–1977, interview with the author, cassette tape recording (Fort Worth, Tex., 2005).

³⁰ According to Rosetta Ross, DeQuincey Newman was similarly instrumental in encouraging and supporting Victoria Way DeLee in her community activism. Witnessing and Testifying, 127, 135.

³¹ Quote from DeLaris Johnson Risher, Home Missionary, 1954–1957. Interview with the author, cassette tape recording. Charleston, S.C., 2005. The Encampment for Citizenship was an interracial, interreligious summer program for young adults founded by the New York Society for Ethical Culture in 1944. Its purpose was to provide experiences in the principles of liberal democracy through education in volunteerism, political activism and civic responsibility.

³² There are many local histories of civil rights campaigns that shed light on the behind-the-scenes work of local people. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” and Eagles, Charles W., “Toward New Histories of The Civil Rights Era,” The Journal of Southern History 66, no. 4 (Nov. 2000): 815–848CrossRefGoogle Scholar are two important articles arguing the significance of this perspective for reconstructing the narrative. More pertinent to my work, Nasstrom's, Kathryn L. “Down to Now: Memory, Narrative, and Women's Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement in Atlanta, Georgia,” Gender and History 11, no.1 (April 1999): 113–144CrossRefGoogle Scholar, argues for the importance of local histories in uncovering women's organizing leadership.

³³ Bowen, J. W. E., “Home Missions Council on Race,” Central Christian Advocate 122, no. 8 (February 20, 1947): 3Google Scholar.

³⁴ Flora Clipper, United Methodist Deaconess, 1950–1988. Interview with the author, cassette recording, Jeffersonville, Ind. (2005).

³⁵ Ibid.

³⁶ This story is recalled in Louise Dutcher Johnson, History of Comittment, 63. Many thanks to Mary Agnes Dougherty for loaning me her copy.

³⁷ Johnson Risher, interview with the author.

³⁸ Cobb, Yes, Lord, 91.

³⁹ Jeanette (Jan) Marion Evans Evans, “You Are a Child of God: A Memoir” (unpublished manuscript in author's possession), as told to Nancy Morris Barden (2002), 61.

⁴⁰ Both Flora Clipper and DeLaris Johnson related their experiences at National and Scaritt, respectively, as nothing but positive and a stark contrast to life off campus. Johnson, in fact stated, “When you're on that campus you're in a different world.” See Clipper, interview with the author and DeLaris Johnson Risher.

⁴¹ Countryman, Matthew J., Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 26Google Scholar.

⁴² Countryman notes that in 1938, the FBI estimated eighty-three anti-Semitic and KKK-affiliated groups in Philadelphia with ten thousand members. Up South, 26.

⁴³ Beckwith, interview with the author.

⁴⁴ Ibid.

⁴⁵ See Evelyn Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent 211–21, for a discussion of the role of Burroughs’ school in racial uplift and self-help and Wolcott, Victoria, “Bible, Bath and Broom: Nannie Helen Burroughs’ National Training School and African-American Racial Uplift” in Journal of Women's History 9, no. 1 (1997): 88–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall notes the master-servant relationship maintained through industrial training schools. Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry, 11.

⁴⁶ The account is given in depth in MacDonnell, R. W., Belle Harris Bennett Her Life Work (Nashville: Board of Missions Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1928), 121ffGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁷ Beckwith, interview with the author.

⁴⁸ Ibid.

⁴⁹ Annual Report of the Woman's Society of Christian Service of the Methodist Church (1960), 152.

⁵⁰ Bowen, J. W. E., “New Missionary Opportunity,” Central Christian Advocate 122, no. 4 (January 23, 1947): 3Google Scholar.

⁵¹ For Central Jurisdiction response to new mission policy see Bowen, J. W. E., “New Missionary Opportunity,” Central Christian Advocate 122, no. 4 (January 23, 1947): 3Google Scholar. On restrictions placed on the presence of black missionaries by colonial governments see Johnson, Lillie M., “Missionary-Government Relations: Black Americans in British and Portuguese Colonies,” in Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa, Jacobs, Sylvia M. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982).Google Scholar

⁵² J. W. E. Bowen, “New Missionary Opportunity.”

⁵³ Florence Dyett. “Woman's Society of Christian Service — Central Jurisdiction — Our Tasks.” Central Christian Advocate (June 5, 1941), 8.

⁵⁴ Bowen, J. W. E., “A New Missionary Challenge,” Central Christian Advocate 122, no. 28 (July 10, 1947): 3Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ Ellen Barnette file, letter dated May 9, 1956 in, Missionary Correspondence Files.

⁵⁶ Quoted in United Methodist Church Board of Global Ministries, To a Higher Glory, 39–40.

⁵⁷ Borstelmann, Thomas, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 61–62Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ Bowen, J. W. E., “Turbaned Traveller,” Central Christian Advocate 123, no. 1 (January 1, 1948): 3Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ Ellen Barnette, Foreign Missionary, 1949–1952. Interview with the author, Cassette tape recording, 2007 (Washington, D.C).

⁶⁰ Lillie M. Johnson, “Missionary-Government Relations,” 208. Carrying these subscriptions was more than likely quite rare, for as Johnson observes, the Portuguese who colonized Angola were more amenable to black American missionaries than were the British. By 1919, she notes, the door was virtually closed to black American missionaries in British African colonies.

⁶¹ Robert, “First Globalization.”

⁶² Letter dated September 12, 1960 in Doris J. Wilson file in Missionary Correspondence Files.

⁶³ Ibid.

⁶⁴ Beckwith, interview with the author.

⁶⁵ See Beckwith, Johnson and Barnette interviews with the author.

⁶⁶ See Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement” and Kathryn Nasstrom, “Down to Now” for discussion and analysis of the impact of received narrative on historical memory.