After spending most of the 1930s working in elementary schools and with the YWCA in Kansas City, Kansas, Josephine Beckwith decided to connect her work more closely with the church. Right across the state line in Kansas City, Missouri was the National College for Christian Workers, a training institute for women entering Christian service that was run by the Women's Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Church. “I think one day I'd like to go to that school to get an education related to religious experiences,” she said to herself. After making her desire known to her minister at Centennial Methodist Church, the young adult group gave her a scholarship, “but there was a slight hitch….it was the state of Missouri and no blacks could enter the school.” According to Beckwith, with the aid of Thelma Stevens, a white leader in the Woman's Division of the Methodist Church, litigation was pursued involving the faculty of the college and the state of Missouri. It was finally agreed that Beckwith could attend the school; however, the state would not allow her to live on campus.Footnote 1 Twelve years later, in 1952, DeLaris Johnson joined Lelia Robinson to be the first African American students admitted to the Methodist women's missionary training school in Nashville, Scarritt College for Christian Workers. Unlike Beckwith, DeLaris Johnson was permitted to live on the Scarritt campus; however, as rumors spread through town of Negro students living and eating with white students, college officials were forced to hold meetings to placate anxious white citizens.Footnote 2
In 1949, Ellen Barnette and Pearl Bellinger were engaged in desegregating a different missionary site. The two alumnae of Spellman College would join two young men to be the only African Americans in a group of 50 recent college graduates to venture into a three-year missionary program in India. The four of them were the first African Americans to be sent by the Methodist Church as missionaries to India. Barnette was eager to see other parts of the world away from her native Georgia, while Bellinger found herself enchanted by the “romance, splendor and mystery—the allure of the East.” Both women found, however, that the absence of segregation laws on the international field, such as those challenged by Josephine Beckwith in Missouri, did not mean an absence of a segregation mindset among white missionaries or an awareness of entrenched segregation practices in the US by indigenous Indians. Upon her return, Bellinger related an exchange with an Indian government official:
You are here to show us how good America is to her minorities.
We are here as brothers in Christ.
The gentleman laughed and so did the others in the group. He then said, But you all have a ‘checker-board’ Christianity.Footnote 3
Bellinger's and Barnette's experiences suggest that serving as an international missionary did not spare them the trials of US racism. Like Josephine Beckwith, in their missionary work through the 1940s and 50s they journeyed down paths that confronted traditional patterns of segregation and fostered missionary practices that worked toward dismantling racial barriers.
Stories of missionary women challenging segregation in the mid-twentieth century likely ring unfamiliar to many. Histories of African American women's mission organizing and those of their civil rights organizing typically are framed as separate endeavors, the former coming to a close during the 1920s only to be superseded by the latter in the 1940s. In teasing out connections between black women's missionary efforts and civil rights activism in the 1940s and 50s, this article bridges what has been a disjuncture in African American women's religious histories. It illuminates the ways beliefs about Christian mission shaped the community work of black Methodist women so that narratives of civil rights organizing and Christian missions are no longer discrete categories. Instead, this research reveals not only their historical overlap, but moreover, their historical continuity.
Outstanding scholarship on the early decades after emancipation has demonstrated the importance of mission societies as sites through which black women engaged the racist state.Footnote 4 In these societies, women cultivated leadership skills and provided necessary community services such as education and neighborhood sanitation that were key links in plans for racial progress. Mission societies also forged the interracial networks that laid the foundation for desegregation efforts of a later generation of women like Beckwith and Johnson. As the scholarship moves further into the twentieth century, however, the central role of church membership and mission organizing is elided for political organizing and civil rights work. Histories of black women in America during the 1940s-60s portray church sanctuaries as sites for rallying and inspiring protesters to march out in defense of their political and civil rights guaranteed by the US Constitution. Numerous edited volumes and monographs uncover the indispensible role of women in grassroots organizing for civil rights, illuminating the ways “men led, but women organized” as Charles Payne so succinctly put it, while disregarding the role of faith convictions.Footnote 5
Yet, in Beckwith and Johnson, Barnette and Bellinger, we find women who did, indeed, encounter and confront segregation and Jim Crow, and they did so in explicitly religious vocations and spaces where their confidence in the authority of their Christian faith and vocation took prominence over their confidence in the authority of the US Constitution. In an era whose history is told in the drama of civil rights, and in the context of the missionary vocation, which it is argued had reached a period of declension, we are left to wonder how these two can possibly intersect.Footnote 6 What relationship, if any, could African American women's Christian missionary efforts have with civil rights activism?
Using the mission society of African American women in the Methodist Church as a lens of analysis, I uncover the previously unexamined significance of mission organizing and mission experience for black women as a site of confrontation with and the battle against segregation. In 1939, after nearly 100 years of schism and three decades of consultation, the Methodist Episcopal Church, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and the Methodist Protestant Church agreed to terms for reunification. The agreement was reached, however, with the compromise of segregation written into the constitution of the new denomination. White congregations were organized geographically into jurisdictional units while African American congregations were grouped into one, large jurisdiction called the Central Jurisdiction which spanned thirty-nine states.Footnote 7 In a newly segregated denomination, the Woman's Society for Christian Service (WSCS) provided a site for cultivating leadership and a public voice as well as offering new and increased opportunities for domestic and international mission work. The result was that in the hands of at least some African American women, missionary work was being reframed as social activism and no longer as only social service as it engaged with the global forces of racism. It is this dramatic transformation of the shape of missionary practice that more broadly drives this reconsideration of black women's religious activism and leadership in the civil rights era.
In shedding light on the ways mission organizing and service served as a site for cultivating leadership and engaging segregation and racism in the 1940s and 50s, this article is a response to recent historiographical critiques of civil rights narratives. Very broadly, it is a crucial piece of what Jacquelyn Dowd Hall names “The Long Civil Rights Movement” as the narrative below pushes at the boundaries of the master narrative by revealing the interplay of civil rights ideals and mission ideals in unanticipated locations yet commonplace circumstances on international and domestic mission fields.Footnote 8 More specifically, though, this essay begins to fill a gap in scholarship noted by sociologist Cheryl Townsend Gilkes. As she asserted in a recent essay, our understanding of black women activists, particularly in the civil rights era, explores the crucial nature of their work as grassroots, community organizers, but rarely as “leaders whose political vision and determined action was informed by their foundation in faith and in the church.”Footnote 9 Using missionary work as a lens through which to view black women's religious activism in the 1940s and 50s reveals a previously unexplored venue in which segregation and discrimination were encountered and challenged. While the women whose stories are related below were not defying white Citizens Councils to register to vote or being pummeled by fire hoses while engaging in peaceful protests, they were, nonetheless, engaging and challenging racial barriers. Their stories remind us of the breadth of activism during these decades and the deeply held Christian ideals that informed even the most quotidian of encounters.
Although the racial complexities of women's mission theories cannot be denied, the principles of “woman's work for woman” at the turn of the twentieth century and “world friendship” in the interwar years laid the groundwork for the more progressive visions of a “Christian world order” which sought to equalize human, social, and political relations. Originating in white women's ambitions to uplift women in other cultures, women's mission theory evolved to advocate ideals of friendship across international and racial lines during the interwar years, an idea that fostered understanding and cooperation, even while western missionaries still held cultural and financial resources.Footnote 10 With the onset of World War II, church missionary leaders began to speak of “world brotherhood” and building a “Christian world order” to indicate visions of mutuality and Christian presence through missionary service.Footnote 11 Young men and women receiving missionary training in the 1940s and 50s thus were educated in a community that believed missionaries should be as concerned with converting and transforming human social and political relationships as they were with converting and transforming souls.
This progression of women's mission theory provided the fertile soil in which African American women mission leaders could plant their particular visions of “world friendship” and a “Christian world order.” Consider, for instance, the words of Margaret Davis Bowen, the Jurisdictional President of the black Methodist women's mission society. Speaking at the 1946 Woman's Assembly, a quadrennial, international gathering of Methodist women, she asserted:
I, too, am an American . . . to be a Negro American in a day like this demands Christlike forgiveness, rare patience, and strange loyalty in order to overcome the difficulties that keep thirteen million of us from enjoying ‘Peace in a Nation of Nations.’ Our young people are pleading for equality of opportunity for all men regardless of race, color, or creed, for the right of a man to be considered on his merits. We are trying to give our students at Gilbert a philosophy by which to live—a philosophy which says, ‘Four things we will not do, in spite of all: We will not hate; we will not cease to laugh and multiply; we will not use the ancient carnal tools; we will not waver in our loyalty.’Footnote 12
As the principal of Gilbert Academy, a college preparatory school in New Orleans founded and supported by the Woman's Division, Bowen presented a new face for mission work by and for African American women. Since the inception of white women's home missionary societies, it was common practice for African American women to speak before large gatherings of white women as a demonstration of the progress of mission work among Negro women. In 1946, however, Bowen was not serving in that capacity; she was, instead, speaking before this international gathering making demands for equal citizenship and relaying the way this was being played out in a mission school. This interweaving of women's missionary traditions with the political rhetoric for equality reveals the way black Methodist women articulated a new vision and practice of mission in the civil rights era. Thus, engaging in what are commonly considered civil rights activities while in the midst of missionary service reflected the influence of a social activist and reforming vision of Christian mission that was taught at missionary training schools and espoused in mission rhetoric.
Missionary training schools and community centers in the southern and midwestern United States and mission projects in India, Malaysia, or Angola are sites that went undetected by reporters and politicians of the time and remain neglected by historians of the present. Yet as Josephine Beckwith, Ellen Barnette, and Pearl Bellinger, in addition to other black women mission activists, show us they were sites where ideals of mission clashed with and confronted principles of segregations and racism. In their stories our understandings of the religious lives and activism of African American women are greatly enriched and expanded.
I. A New World Order
The First Annual Meeting of the Central Jurisdiction WSCS was held at Asbury Methodist Church in Washington D.C. on December 18–20, 1941—less than two weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. While the apprehension surrounding the nation's entrance into yet another global conflict hung in the air, feelings of determination and possibility prevailed as the women looked ahead to the part they would play in building a new world order at war's end. Leading the women in devotions at that first Annual Meeting, Mrs. Hattie Hargis pinpointed the feelings of anxiety that permeated the atmosphere:
This morning we are in a world that is much disturbed about world conditions. We are here assembled in the capitol of the nation. There seems to be a restlessness among everyone, and we cannot help it, because of the uncertain conditions. We do not know what to expect. We do not know how long we will be here. We are just disturbed.Footnote 13
Hargis went on to encourage the women to trust in the Prince of Peace and consecrate their work to him, yet the mood of this wartime meeting did not focus on simply spiritualizing earthly troubles. Rather, building on their spiritual foundations, members of the Central Jurisdiction WSCS utilized their connections with other African American women's organizations as they prepared for the work of building the Kingdom of God and ushering in a new day. “There was never a time in the history of the world when there was a greater demand upon Christian women for united purpose and action,” declared Addye Ware, President of the Lexington Conference WSCS.Footnote 14 “The world is challenging its womanhood,” she went on. “We . . . have accepted that challenge beautifully, and have pledged our loyalty to the great objective of interesting all of the women in the Church in interest of giving service, and thereby helping to establish a Christian world.”Footnote 15
Establishing a Christian world order had been a concern of the international mission movement since the end of World War I. By World War II, however, building a Christian world no longer reflected the impulse to convert the world to Christ, as championed by John R. Mott at the end of the nineteenth century. Rather, it reflected a move to uncover commonalties believed to exist at the core of all religions and to uncover the ways all religions pointed to Christ.Footnote 16 Still grounded in the primacy of Christianity, missionary leaders aspired to build this new world order by means of the ecumenism of the World Council of Churches and the Federal Council of Churches, and internationalism of the United Nations.Footnote 17 In emphasizing the importance of their “Christian womanhood,” black and white women in the WSCS were claiming their stake in crafting the Christian world.
While women of the Central Jurisdiction WSCS were unmistakably believers in the place of missions for crafting a Christian world, they were equally influenced by the rhetoric of internationalism and unity prevalent among leaders of the American black community. As Jonathan Rosenberg demonstrates, the linking of international affairs and American racial injustices laid the groundwork for rhetoric of “color conscious internationalism” which became a central component of both a foreign and domestic message of race reform throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Believing in the power of transnational organizations, such as the United Nations, to secure racial justice at home and abroad, the special role of the United States in shaping world politics, and the transnational unity and cooperation of oppressed peoples, internationalist race reformers worked to influence their audience as well as US policymakers in the arena of domestic and international affairs.Footnote 18
Guest speakers at the first Annual Meeting of the Central Jurisdiction WSCS and throughout the 1940s reflected this fusion of political and mission rhetoric and demonstrated a self-understanding on the part of members of the WSCS as participants in a national network of black women's movements. Drawing on the collective power of their Christian womanhood, these speakers made undeniable intimations that the outbreak of war presented a pivotal moment for black women to claim an equal role in the building of the new world order. African American women, they asserted, should claim their rightful place as American citizens in their nation's time of need to ensure a Christian world order that was manifested in friendship and equality across lines of denomination, race, and sex.
As a representative of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the YWCA, Julia West Hamilton, for example, closed her address by reminding her listeners that “We are full-fledged American citizens, and we are willing to give the very best in that we as Negro women are pledging anew our allegiance to the flag of the United States in offering our Christian service.”Footnote 19 Mrs. C. L. Russell of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church related her community's service during the war emergency by organizing for Civilian Defense and taking first aid classes. Expressing a hope that “this war will draw people of the world closer” she advised that as Christian women they must all be alert to their duty and “pray and love more if we are going to bring about the Kingdom of God on this earth.”Footnote 20 Although their speeches only hint at the international implications of their Christian service, Nannie Helen Burroughs made clear that their common goal as Christian women was world friendship. Emphasizing that they could reach across denominational lines to “join hands in this common cause,” Burroughs asserted “God is giving you a chance . . . to see together how we can learn to work together without regard to race, or denomination, or country. World fellowship, and World friendship, and world cooperation . . . will be an outcome of meetings like these, in a crisis like this.”Footnote 21
The significance of the visitors present at the inaugural meeting of the Central Jurisdiction WSCS cannot be overemphasized. Since the end of the nineteenth century, networking was an essential means for African American women to “disseminate information and promote collective political action.”Footnote 22 They did this through Greek-letter sororities, housewives leagues, YWCAs, and, of course, church organizations. The array of speakers and the nature of their addresses suggest that the WSCS of the Central Jurisdiction was considered a part of that network. The fact that the WSCS regularly paid dues to the National Council of Negro Women substantiates the likelihood that the membership intended their mission organization to be a part of that network. In this way, the leaders of WSCS identified their mission work with the collective work of black women as well as with the collective work of Methodist women. Further, it underscores the intention of the Central Jurisdiction women to be, and their self-understanding as, a national organization working to change the status of black women by means of their Christian missionary zeal.
An important link in this broader connection was black Methodist women's “spiritual mother,” Mary McLeod Bethune. Present at the WSCS organizing meeting just one year earlier and unquestionably the most influential black woman of her era, Bethune was not only the founder of Methodist related Bethune-Cookman College and a member of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's black cabinet, she was also an influential and lifelong friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, who, with the support of this friendship, became an important advocate for the black community. Bethune served as President of the National Association of Colored Women and went on to found its understood successor, the National Council of Negro Women, in 1935, and in 1945 served as an NAACP representative to the organizational meeting of the United Nations along with W. E. B. DuBois and NAACP President, Walter White.
In addition to her presence at the 1940 organizing meeting, Bethune was a frequent visitor to Annual Meetings of the Central Jurisdiction WSCS throughout the 1940s and 50s. Her addresses to the women of the Central Jurisdiction vividly demonstrated the blending of political rhetoric of color conscious internationalism with the Christian mission vision of a new world order that would shape the practice of missionaries in the field like Beckwith and Barnette. Speaking to the Annual Meeting in 1944, she declared,
These are your moments now . . . Not only in the United States of America but throughout the world you are called—to help make this a better place in which to live. . . . We want a spiritual garb to undergir[d] us so that we may realize that every man is made in His image and that the God we love and serve is the Father of us all. . . . Forget color of a man's skin and realize that we are brothers—we are one in Church . . . in State. . . . Go out—way out where there's no electric light—no telephone—no beautiful choir no wonderful surroundings. . . . They are waiting for you—for me. . . . God give unto you the knowledge of your responsibility that you may go out to make this beautiful world all that He would have it be!Footnote 23
Before finishing her speech, Bethune linked world peace to international racial justice in what was essentially the clarion call of color conscious internationalists: “Before we can have peace, harmony, brotherhood, everyone of us must have a full chance to be the best we can be.”
Three years later, she spoke again before the WSCS of the Central Jurisdiction reiterating the themes so prominent in her public life.
You are called upon to stand upon your feet as you have never stood before; to extend your hand in brotherhood to men of all lands, and races and classes; and believing deep down in your soul of souls that out of one blood God, our God, created all the nations of the earth. . . . God give you great courage and strength to stand up and be counted among those who are working for a world of peace, and of love, and of brotherhood.Footnote 24
Bethune's speeches are illustrative of the ways in which Christian black American women drew upon the realities of their existence in a racist society to shape a particular vision and practice of mission expressive of their experience and their convictions for a Christian world. They infused a vision of world friendship formed by a racially maternalistic missionary tradition with their legacy of color conscious internationalism to produce a vision of mission that in prophetic fashion critiqued current racist structures around the globe and insisted that racial justice be at the heart of the Christian world order. It was in the context of this missionary ideal that young African American women were trained and entered the field of domestic and international missions.
II. Methodist Experiments and Disobedient Students
The same year Josephine Beckwith applied to National College, the editors of World Outlook, the organ for southern Methodist women's mission societies wrote, “our policy of home missions must also have a strong social content,” and declared that the sin of “racial prejudice” must “be included in the field of our missionary operations.”Footnote 25 While we can only speculate on the level of collaboration between Beckwith, her church, and the women's mission board, this overlap of her decision to attend National with a new policy of home missions does suggest that her application to National was a piece of a much broader plan to confront and dismantle racial prejudice by reshaping mission policy and practice. Josephine Beckwith was raised in the Methodist Episcopal Church and was an active member of the Methodist Student Movement as a college student and young adult, attending interracial student gatherings across the United States during the 1930s. Combined with her community work with the YWCA, which was actively pursuing desegregation in its branches throughout the 1930s, and her membership in the largest black Methodist Church in Kansas City, Kansas, she would have been familiar to women of the denomination. Given the connectional nature of women's mission societies, the intentions of Beckwith, her congregation, and the Woman's Home Missionary Society would naturally converge.
This conclusion is particularly convincing in the context of the pending reunification of the Methodist Church in 1939. As the 1930s came to a close and the segregated structure of a reunified Methodism loomed, African American and white women were devising ways for mission societies to circumvent and even undermine the barriers of denominational segregation. White Methodist women were encouraged to cultivate cooperative relationships between white and Negro congregations and mission societies. Meanwhile the newly elected officers of the African American women's jurisdictional mission society met in Cincinnati, Ohio to plan a strategy for an effective presence in the new denomination.
Susie Jones, one of the executive officers attending the Cincinnati meeting, revealed the ultimate aims of their segregated mission society when she asserted the importance of meeting their denominational dues: “We cannot stand on our feet if the Central Jurisdiction does not pay its assessments. It's a different thing to be standing in a meeting demanding our rights if we are to remain a missionary group waiting to be handed out to.”Footnote 26 The strategy Jones envisioned for black Methodist women in 1940 included more than following a mission plan orchestrated by white leadership; it was a vision that encompassed the building of a self-sufficient mission organization demanding their rights in a segregated denomination and beyond. Her words offer a glimpse into an unacknowledged aspect of Christian missionary organizing that casts Beckwith's, Bellinger's and Barnette's, experiences and work in their proper perspective.
Meanwhile, the same 1939 article that advocated a mission policy with strong social content also told readers that mission must do more than regenerate the individual; “the environment in which individuals live must be reconstructed according to the Christian pattern.”Footnote 27 As they entered a new decade, women's mission societies would be looking not only to convert individuals, but also to reshape social environments along Christian ideals of “brotherhood” and equality in the eyes of God. The aim of Methodist women's mission in regards to segregation was thus twofold—the dismantling of segregation within their denomination and the eradication of racial prejudice in society that leads to segregation. Combined with Susie Jones’s admonition at the 1940 Cincinnati meeting this 1939 article reminds us that creating and implementing a policy of home missions that eliminated racial prejudice was a shared process deriving from the overlapping and coordinating initiatives of African American women and white women.
Putting this plan into action meant the two missionary training schools run by Methodist women would be linchpins in the design because these were the sites for shaping the vision of future missionaries. Since both these schools were located in southern states, National College for Christian Workers in Kansas City, Missouri and Scarritt College in Nashville, Tennessee, Beckwith and Johnson planted the Woman's Division of the Methodist Church squarely in the trajectory of the NAACP campaign for school desegregation begun in 1935 when they applied to and enrolled in these southern schools. Undoubtedly, the NAACP cases argued across the South influenced the decisions of Josephine Beckwith to enter National College and DeLaris Johnson to apply to Scarritt, as well as bolstered the determination of white Methodist women to support them in the challenge to denominational and state authorities.
One of these early cases, in fact, came out of the state of Missouri and would surely have garnered the attention of Beckwith. In 1938, the NAACP successfully argued before the Supreme Court Gaines v. Canada in which the court determined that it was no longer sufficient for the state of Missouri to send African Americans out of state to attend law school, but rather it must provide a separate law school for blacks, or admit them to the all-white University of Missouri. Writing in the Crisis, the official organ of the NAACP, Lucile Bluford said of the Gaines decision that while University of Missouri officials struggled to satisfy the Supreme Court decision without admitting African American students, “Negroes of the state were seeking ways and means of making the decision effective at once.”Footnote 28 Unquestionably, Beckwith was one of those students willing to test the decision's efficacy. Although the women's division at Methodist-related Gammon Theological School in Atlanta was available for her to attend without the struggle of being admitted in Missouri, Beckwith maintained that she did not want to go to Atlanta, but that she wanted to receive missionary education where she lived.Footnote 29 Like Lloyd Gaines, the plaintiff in Gaines v. Canada and Lucile Bluford who became a plaintiff against the University of Missouri in October 1939, Beckwith plainly believed the days of dispatching African American students to other states in order to attend school were over. Furthermore, the fact that Centennial Methodist Church gave her a scholarship to attend National College, suggests her African American congregation was likewise eager to challenge the limits of segregation.
DeLaris Johnson's admission to Scarritt College for Christian Workers in 1952 held much more explicit ties to the NAACP campaign. Her minister, Rev. I. DeQuincey Newman's role in organizing the Orangeburg chapter of the NAACP highlights the intentional networking relied upon by the NAACP, its local chapters, and local church leaders that would have been instrumental in Johnson's recruitment to Scarritt.Footnote 30 While Johnson maintains she had “no idea that I was supposed to have been, shall we say, a guinea pig,” her experience in interracial national YWCA meetings and the Encampment for Citizenship made her an excellent candidate to be “part of a Methodist experiment.”Footnote 31 Both organizations provided crucial grounding for young adults not only in interracial cooperation, but also the progressive outlook that would have facilitated her adaptation to the international student body at Scarritt. Thus, although she was “selected” by her pastor as an ideal candidate for the Methodist experiment, she was by no means an unwitting guinea pig.Footnote 32 In his role as a leader in both the NAACP and the Methodist Church, Newman clearly saw in Johnson, the daughter of professional educators who was experienced in interracial educational programs, an ideal candidate for the integration of another Methodist missionary training school.
Newman's connection to Johnson and the scholarship she was offered, like the scholarship provided to Beckwith by her church, uncovers the calculated moves by African American religious communities to disrupt the racial status quo in their denomination and in US society at large. By 1952, moreover, they also had full backing of a broader body of church mission boards. The Home Missions Council of North America, representing more than twenty Protestant denominations, listed six imperatives for the improvement of race relations in the United States in 1947. Among them was the assertion that “home mission forces should join with other forces, both inside and outside the church” to effect change and eradicate segregation.Footnote 33 Beckwith's and Johnson's participation in school desegregation in this era, therefore, must be seen as more than mimicry of larger, more newsworthy cases. Viewed in the framework of the constitutional segregation of the Methodist Church and the import of women's mission organizing for securing institutional and public voice, desegregating these missionary training schools becomes the critical starting point of a women's mission program that shaped itself for the work of national race reform and social activism.
Once the initial hurdle of integration was overcome, incorporating anti-segregation activism into missionary training emerged naturally. For instance, the agreement to allow Beckwith to attend National College included the contingency that she not reside on campus. So she made the daily commute by streetcar from her home in Kansas City, Kansas to Missouri. Yet the residential students were not satisfied with this compromise and regularly found reasons for Beckwith to spend the night on campus in one of their rooms. A late-night class or an early-morning conference supplied the impetus for an invitation to relieve her of the drudgery of the commute and to subvert the conditions imposed by the state. Beckwith's willing acceptance demonstrated her continued commitment to challenging local racial barriers. Five years later, when she entered as a freshman at National College, Flora Clipper heard Beckwith's story and, when recalling it in her retirement, remarked, “the funny thing about it is that the students have always been disobedient.”Footnote 34
Throughout the 1940s, the students’ disobedience would expand its influence beyond the campus. Receiving complementary tickets to a performance at a local concert hall, a group of National students, including Clipper, an African American from Indiana, journeyed downtown for an evening out. Once seated in the theater, however, Clipper alone was challenged when an usher asked to see her ticket. The theater manager phoned the dean of students the next day and insisted that no more African American students be sent to the theater. The dean's refusal to capitulate to the manager's demand, and by implication the community's racial codes, was a powerful affirmation of the missionary training school's commitment to racial equality.Footnote 35 The dedication was made more forcefully evident later in the 1940s as missionary students at National joined with students from Park College in Parkville, Missouri and Lincoln University, the only African American university in Missouri, to form an interracial alliance that investigated and protested segregation in the Kansas City area. Discovering there were no state or city laws regulating segregation, these students ate in restaurants and went to movie theaters as a testimony to interracial friendship, and more importantly, to persist in changing local segregation practices. Students were particularly persistent in their attempts to desegregate the dining room of the local YMCA and staged sit-ins to force the “Y” to change its practice. In preparation for this endeavor, James Farmer, founder of the Congress of Racial Equality that originated lunch counter sit-ins in Chicago in 1942, came to National's campus to lead training workshops.Footnote 36
The same disobedient spirit emerged on the campus of Scarritt College in the 1950s. When Johnson was on campus, 1952–54, she and fellow white students frequently challenged the Jim Crow transportation system. Johnson would take a seat on the front of the bus and the other students would surround her. In open defiance of Nashville's Jim Crow buses, “We sat anywhere we wanted to sit,” and “no one said anything to us.”Footnote 37 Throughout the 1950s, students and faculty at Scarritt not only challenged segregation in public transportation but also in theaters and restaurants and participated in protests and marches.Footnote 38 By the end of the decade, as civil rights activism was intensifying, Scarritt students joined with students from Vanderbilt and Fisk Universities to work with James Lawson, a seminary student at Vanderbilt University and organizer of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, to participate in the burgeoning sit-in movement in Nashville.Footnote 39
Young men and women attending Scarritt or National in the 1940s and 50s were thus educated in a community that believed missionaries should be as concerned with converting and transforming human social and political relationships as they were with converting and transforming souls. Engaging in what are commonly considered civil rights activities during missionary training wove practices of challenging constructed racial barriers in missionary service. While African American women attending National and Scarritt Colleges during the 1940s and 50s experienced campus life as a “bubble” isolated from the trying and humiliating realities of the era's segregation, it was that experience which impelled them and their companion white students to translate their vision and firsthand knowledge of an interracial community into the local community.Footnote 40
III. “A Leavening Force”
When she arrived in Philadelphia in 1942 at her first assignment for the Woman's Division, Josephine Beckwith became quickly involved with her work as the Director of Mt. Zion Church Community Center. She went out to the street corner and rounded up neighborhood children to enroll them and their mothers in after school programs and mothers’ training classes. Beckwith's missionary work did not end there, however. In addition to her associations with the local YWCA and city recreation league, Beckwith also participated in Fellowship House, a non-profit education center with Quaker roots. Founded in 1931 as the Young Peoples’ Interracial Fellowship, the organization adopted the model of a settlement house in 1941 when it changed its name to Fellowship House. Headed by Methodist Marjorie Penney, it served as a community setting where people of all faiths and races could meet, talk, and dine together and “developed an educational program to counter racial and religious prejudice in the city.”Footnote 41
During the latter thirties and World War II, the work of the “Fellowshipers,” as they were called, took on a particular urgency. Pro-fascist and racist groups grew significantly and Beckwith's regular participation with Fellowship House reflects her understanding of the role of the home missionary in fostering what was then termed “intergroup relations.”Footnote 42 As part of a trio she identified as composed of “a Christian, a Jew and a Catholic” Beckwith spoke to various groups in the city to educate and demonstrate the value of their interracial and interreligious cooperation. According to Beckwith, their particular focus during the war was discrimination against Jews. As she recalls, “There wasn't so much fuss about the blacks” at that time, “but they hated the Jews.”Footnote 43
Beckwith's description of her role in the work of Fellowship House is crucial here for understanding the work of home missions in this era as it overlaps with the more explicitly political activism of organizations like the NAACP. She did not name her part in the trio of teachers as African American, but as a Christian. Although the Fellowshipers were interracial as well as interreligious, and Beckwith proudly claimed her status as the first African American to be commissioned a home missionary in the Methodist Church, she nonetheless, interpreted her work with the Fellowship House through the lens of her Christian Protestant identity and vocation. Foregrounding her religious identification indicates that she perceived her work for improved race relations and social justice as fundamentally emanating from her vocation as a home missionary seeking to shape Christian “brotherhood” and not from a Constitutional right to racial equality. This is one example of the missing element Gilkes is seeking in the narratives of black women activists; Beckwith's vision for social and political equality was informed by her faith and her religious vocation.
An encounter Beckwith had at her next assignment further illumines the way her vocation informed her social vision. After serving ten years in Philadelphia, she was appointed as the Executive Director of the Bethlehem Center in Oklahoma City. This center was part of a chain of Bethlehem Centers across the South started by women in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South in 1910 to provide child care and parent education to African American families in growing urban areas. While in Oklahoma City, Beckwith found herself at loggerheads with the white woman who was President of the Board of Directors over the purpose of her work:
She noticed that I didn't have any cooking classes for my girls. So I told her that I didn't think there was interest in this. Well, she thought I should have cooking classes anyway because, “These girls need to know how to cook when they grow up so they can get a job.” To which I replied, “I don't think they're going to grow up to be cooks.”Footnote 44
Her decision to eliminate cooking classes from the curriculum was a progressive step toward dismantling racial and gender stereotypes that originated in Beckwith's missionary vocation. In addition to providing basic elementary education, the majority of missionary schools for young African American women were established as industrial training schools that taught “domestic science” courses in cooking, sewing, and household management. This was true of schools founded by African American women, such as Nannie Helen Burroughs’ National Training School for Women and Girls, as well as those founded by white women's mission organizations. Yet, while Burroughs saw the “professionalization” of even menial, domestic service as a step toward self-help and respectability, for southern white women, in particular, industrial schools were a means of perpetuating the mistress-servant relationship of slavery.Footnote 45 The founding of the women's annex at Paine College by the women of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South is particularly illustrative here as initial pledges were given in memory of members’ “old nurses”—Mammy Ritter, Aunt Gillie and Aunt Phillis.Footnote 46 In this way, the education program of the women's annex was imbued with the nostalgia for antebellum relationships between white women and their slaves.
By mid-century, these philosophies of African American women's education clashed, as illustrated in Beckwith's disagreement with her supervisor on the Board of Directors. Reflecting a rootedness in Burroughs’ belief in education as a means toward self-support and respectability, in the early 1950s Beckwith carried that to its logical conclusion and now saw education and training as a path out of the traditional mistress-servant relationship between white women and black women. While employment opportunities were limited due to segregation, growing numbers of African American women, nonetheless, were educating themselves to move out of such traditional employment roles and Beckwith obviously understood her work as a home missionary to be instrumental in assisting these young women to achieve their goals. In refusing to offer traditional mission school course offerings that reinscribed the racialized gender roles of cook or domestic, Beckwith drew on the discourse of mission employed by leaders like Susie Jones and Margaret Davis Bowen. “Demanding our rights” and aiding young people who were “pleading for equality of opportunity” was inherent in her missionary practice.
Beckwith's assignment in 1958 literally embodied the political shape African American women's home missionary service held during the civil rights era. She was appointed to the Bethlehem Community Center in Savannah, Georgia in 1958 which was originally opened in 1949 when women of the Methodist Church joined with members of an African American Congregational church to fund and staff a center located in a home in an African American neighborhood. Shortly before Beckwith arrived, however, the Woman's Division purchased three lots in a predominantly white neighborhood to accommodate the Savannah African American community's growing needs. On these three lots, the new Bethlehem Center was composed of a day care facility, a community center for afterschool programs, and staff housing, and the only playground for African American children in the city of Savannah. When Beckwith arrived in September, 1958, then, her primary task was preparation for and oversight of the move to the new facility. Once situated, in addition to directing the work of the center, her focus was on developing and negotiating community relations until she left in 1960.
Told by the Woman's Division that this assignment required someone with “maturity and experience,”Footnote 47 Beckwith likely was appointed because of her race. Concerns of the white neighbors and questions from local authorities would have to be addressed to an African American woman who had charge of the community complex, thereby posing a forthright challenge to the racial patterns of the South which placed African American women in the lowest of social positions. The disruptive nature of her supervisory presence is underscored in a conversation she overheard between white interns she directed and their supervisors. According to Beckwith, they told one young student “they could not stand ‘how you can have a nigger as your executive director.’”Footnote 48 In addition, Beckwith was greeted by protesters and challenged by building inspectors and state social welfare officials during her tenure. In response to this harassment, she countered by relying on the authority of the Woman's Division of the Methodist Church, asserting that it maintained all the required paperwork and was up-to-date with required inspections.
Here again is the distinctive mark of this missionary activism. Beckwith did not assert the denomination's or her own constitutional right to desegregate the neighborhood. Rather, her presence in the all-white neighborhood was authorized by her commission as a Methodist missionary. Highlights in her career such as these plainly illustrate the manner in which otherwise politically charged race reform activism took place on explicitly religious sites and thus retained its particularly missionary identification. While believing in and advocating for constitutionally provided rights, missionaries like Beckwith adhered first and foremost to Christian beliefs that held faith in the possibility for reform and renewal of human nature. This is most clearly expressed in her 1959 annual report to the Woman's Division on the work in Savannah:
The Community Center has been a demonstration of goodwill in our neighborhood. Some of the neighbors refuse to accept us but see daily people of a different skin color come into our building to lead a group, meet with a committee, or bring friends for a tour. A philosophy based on our Christian principles which includes respect for those of a different race or creed must be a leavening force in this community where tensions and emotions are at a critical ebb at the present time.Footnote 49
Although Savannah experienced the tensions and emotions rocking the South by the end of the 1950s, in Beckwith's opinion, the work of the home missionary was not to participate in the activities that ignited the tensions, but rather to serve as a leavening force, an element for transformation. According to Beckwith, the center served as a force that transformed the tense relations between African Americans and whites into harmonious ones. Just as yeast transforms the physical nature of dough, Beckwith believed the Christian principles of respect for members of other races manifested in everyday life at the Bethlehem Center acted as the leavening force, the transforming agent that altered the attitudes of the neighbors who refused to accept the members and participants of the center. This perception of missionary service pervaded her work from its start in Philadelphia in 1939 until her retirement in 1975 in Ft. Worth, Texas where she was the first African American appointed to that city's Methodist Community Center.
IV. “She Wore Indian Dress”
Just two years before Ellen Barnette and Pearl Bellinger set sail for India, denominational and Woman's Division policy changes declared, “we must go beyond the sending of Negro missionaries only to Africa to serve among Negro peoples.”Footnote 50 Consequently opportunities in foreign missions for African Americans in the Methodist Church expanded. Up to this point, denominational practice was to send black missionary candidates only to Africa, and even those opportunities became limited after World War I as colonial governments grew uneasy with black Americans who were emboldened by the liberating experiences of serving in a war to save democracy.Footnote 51 Yet, the denomination's new determination, combined with the Woman's Division's new short-term mission programs, like the ones in which Ellen Barnette and Pearl Bellinger participated, made these opportunities even more enticing for young African Americans interested in missionary service and the opportunity to travel abroad.
Leaders in the Central Jurisdiction were eager for their members to take advantage of these new possibilities and presented a challenge to the “young people of the race” to respond quickly to the new opportunities. As editor of the jurisdictional newspaper, The Central Christian Advocate, Rev. J. W. E. Bowen acknowledged that drastically limited opportunities for blacks in the foreign mission field left many disillusioned and uninterested in foreign missions, but, he asserted, it was “time to stop chewing on old bones. . . .Our job now is to get ready to go in and possess the land.”Footnote 52 Ironically, Bowen used the same imperialist imagery that had tainted Protestant foreign missionary work in the past to urge a new generation of African American Methodists to go out, not as western invaders, but as black Christians claiming their rightful place within the structures of the denomination. For many years, African American church leaders had been pressuring the wider church body to grant equal representation to the black membership in all aspects of church life. Now, as black and white denominational leaders closely watched the progress of the United Nations and the World Council of Churches in their quests to develop international brotherhood and a “new world order” at the close of World War II and, as the political implications of the Cold War loomed, doors began to slowly open for African American Methodists to possess that which, in theory, had been promised to them in American democracy.
In the same way that Josephine Beckwith perceived her home missionary work as a “leavening force” in US society, African American Methodist leaders believed international missions could likewise have a transformative effect on the young adults serving in the field as well as the for the people they served. In 1941, Florence Dyett, Promotion Secretary for the Central Jurisdiction WSCS, linked an international outlook to the progress of black Americans by asserting that participation in the WSCS would counteract an attitude which perpetuated the belief that “our difficulties, our struggles, our chances for progress have been the worst” by a “broadening of outlook . . .and a developing of passion for others through consecrated study and service.”Footnote 53 In the same article in which he encouraged black Methodists to “possess the land,” J. W. E. Bowen echoed Dyett's assessment in his interpretation of the dual impact of the integration of the foreign mission field. Having black Americans in a greater variety of missionary sites would, first of all, he argued, bring an “enlargement of vision” and a “broadening of sympathies” of African Americans in the Methodist Church who were often unsympathetic toward far-off peoples as a result of “being shut off to ourselves.” Additionally, Bowen maintained that opening the foreign field was, indeed, “a great forward step in worldwide brotherhood” and, pointing to the diplomatic potential of this move, went on to state, “the people to whom the church will send these Negro missionaries will come to see the sincerity of Methodism's proclamations of brotherhood,” thereby making “the extension of Christ's Kingdom” a reality.Footnote 54
While reformists outside the church argued similarly for the advisability of integrated international diplomatic and political fields, the work of mission leaders should not, as noted in the case of desegregating mission schools, be mistaken for repetition or imitation of the activism beyond church parameters. Race reformers working outside the church contended that World War II had imbued black Americans with an international perspective that energized them for activism on behalf of themselves and other oppressed peoples. Their vision of progress for black Americans resulting from this international perspective, especially at the peak of the Cold War, inhered within the parameters of civil rights. These reformists argued that Jim Crow policies and practices were a liability to America's effective presence on the world stage, and therefore must be eliminated. Mission activists within the church, on the other hand, inserted a Christian vision of personal transformation into their vision of international racial progress. While the achievement of civil rights remained a fundamental aim, the result of black Americans’ connections with a global outlook and experience would be an internal change through which they would be connected with other oppressed people through compassion and sympathy. Furthermore, as races mingled across the globe, a harmony of races and nations would be accomplished and the Kingdom of God expanded, which would naturally include freedom from oppression and civil rights for all. It is this belief in and goal of personal and social transformation, a conversion experience of sorts, which distinguishes mission-grounded civil rights work from politically grounded work.
Once overseas, African American missionaries quickly realized that the notions of racial identities and ordering they contended with in the US had been transported to mission posts across the oceans. After more than a century of white and Western dominance on the mission field, dark-skinned missionaries were a source of confusion for both their fellow white missionaries and indigenous Christians. Ellen Barnette's time in India vividly demonstrates the interstitial space occupied by African American missionaries on the international field and the means by which they challenged the limits of that space. A summary of her work, written by her supervisor upon Barnette's return from India in 1952, illuminates the particular quandary her presence presented.
Evidently she did not get on well with the older missionaries with whom she lived—from them there is some criticism of close friendships with Indians and attempts to identify with the people. She wore Indian dress; she is a Negro. She seems to have been popular with the Indians generally. Her work as a teacher was not outstanding; she seemed more interested in working with the people in the villages.Footnote 55
Behind the straightforward declarative, “she wore Indian dress; she is a Negro,” is the reality that while white women became friendly with indigenous people and wore native dress, their white skin retained for them their separate, missionary status. In the eyes of the older, white missionaries Ellen Barnette's missionary status was compromised not only by her attempts to identify with the people, but even more so by her dark skin wrapped in the folds of a sari.
From the moment of her arrival at the mission school in Baroda, Barnette's identity generated confusion. Wearing a sari she had purchased while in language courses in Bombay, she was not immediately recognized by the white missionaries as a new co-worker but rather was assumed to be an Indian. Her decision to wear a sari, in fact, generated confusion at more than one level.
During my time in Baroda, Indians and foreigners, mistaking me for Indian, differing hair texture and features not withstanding, used to ask my “mother” tongue. It amused me to watch their reactions as they learned I was an American from Georgia. Indian villagers had not heard of Blacks and one elderly village woman insisted that I was an Anglo-Indian trying to pass myself off as an American. This was highly amusing to me for two reasons: 1) Most Anglo-Indians have lighter skin coloring than my deep chocolate tones and 2) Those Anglo-Indians who considered fair skin the badge of privilege would certainly have blanched at my being dubbed Anglo. Yet, on the other hand, an American suggested that perhaps I should not wear the sari so often since it would lower my prestige. I had not come to India for prestige or power; I had come to serve and share. I remember wondering what had been the true motivation for that woman's decision to work and serve in another country.Footnote 56
With dark skin and a sari operating as a marker for indigenous identity, Barnette's status as a culturally and racially superior missionary was perceived to be at stake. Since her skin color could not identify her as a missionary, Western dress, according to her co-worker, would have reserved for her some prestige. Yet her Western mannerisms led some Indians to believe that not only did she hold prestige within Indian social norms, but that she was also trying to “pass” as someone even more prestigious—an American.
Of course, the irony of “passing” was not lost on Barnette as is suggested in her reference to her own skin color. Not only would her “deep chocolate tones” have prevented her from posing as an elite, lighter-skinned Anglo Indian, they likewise would have prevented her from posing as a white woman in the United States. Moreover, the falseness of the American racial caste system was being laid bare in the post-World War II era with the increasing frequency of Third World visitors arriving in the United States as representatives to the United Nations and granted freedoms of white people as they toured the country.Footnote 57 Stories of black Americans testing racial lines by donning African or Indian garb and gaining access to restaurants or first-class train passage ran frequently in the black press, including the story of “The Turbaned Traveller”[sic] in the Central Christian Advocate. Concluding an account of a black preacher from New York who donned a turban and travelled the South “free from the bedevilment . . . of the jim-crow[sic] provisions,” J. W. E. Bowen sardonically remarked, “This is done more often than is generally recognized.”Footnote 58
Like the turbaned traveler, Barnette intentionally used non-Western dress to challenge the assumptions of racial hierarchy, and she did so with the support and encouragement of fellow young, white missionaries.Footnote 59 In transporting to India the practice of “passing” was a way of circumventing and subverting American racial boundaries. Barnette turned the foreign mission field into a site for race reform activism and thus extended the reach of the leavening force of women's missionary service. What it more broadly suggests is that as African American women and men integrated the foreign missionary field, black America's challenge to the church and the world for integration was similarly transported abroad.
Yet, African American missionaries in the post-World War II era were not the first to bring the word of America's brand of racism to the world. While the NAACP and Pan-African Congresses had made great strides in uniting colonized people around the globe and connecting their struggles with the battle against Jim Crow conditions in the United States, black Americans' missionary work to African nations at the end of the nineteenth century and into the early decades of the twentieth century also illumined, in more implicit ways, the substance of American race relations. Racial tensions and frequently segregated work stations revealed to native Africans the nature of race relations in the United States. Additionally, some mission stations like the Galangue mission in Angola, for instance, held subscriptions to Crisis, the Brownie's Book, the children's periodical of the NAACP, and the Chicago Defender, alerting Africans to the similarities between their experiences as colonized Africans and the experiences of missionaries in Jim Crow America.Footnote 60 In 1950, Pearl Bellinger would include in the library at her school in Bidar a subscription to Crisis as well as a supply of fifty copies of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the “Negro national anthem.” Bellinger's inclusion of these materials in the library suggests her intention to remind the newly independent India of its continuing connection to the freedom struggles of those in other lands. Another contributing factor in the globalization of American racism was the practice of “reverse missionaries,” a term mission historian Dana Robert uses to describe the practice of sending indigenous Christians as “ambassadors” to the West as part of the post-World War I mission vision of World Friendship.Footnote 61 Christians from Asian and African countries who were engaged for speaking tours to the US or given scholarships to attend American universities quickly were familiarized with the rules of Jim Crow and shared these stories on their return home. Thus, frequently challenged to respond to the incredulous questions of the indigenous people they served, African American female missionaries found their work on the foreign field shaped by the international community's cognizance of racial conditions in the US.
During her three-year term in Malaya, Doris Wilson utilized the provocations of the Malayans as an opportunity to boldly reflect back to black and white Methodist women's mission societies in America, the international scope of American racist practices, and their implications for the forging of a Christian world order. A graduate of Philander Smith College in Arkansas, Wilson sailed for Taiping, Malaya in 1958 and served until 1961. Writing to her sponsoring churches in America she related,
Undoubtedly your first question would have been: “What do they think of the racial question in the United States and South Africa?” They think plenty about it, for it is inconsistent with Christianity. The students often come up with Time, Life and clippings from the newspaper and say: Did this really happen in your country? . . . Many Malayans ask these questions: “Why do you feel that you are justified in coming to our country to encourage us to be Christians when in your country you have such great racial inequalities and problems?”
Yes, the United States is the leading power of the World but their attitude toward race is a very backward one. This harms the Christian mission work; slows it up years and years.
When you or we feel tempted to point a finger at white South Africa. [sic] We Americans should hang our heads in shame, not only for Little Rock, but for the discrimination in all our towns and cities.Footnote 62
Assuming the first question on her readers’ minds was naturally the international interpretation of US race relations, Wilson directly linked American racial practices to the church's global effectiveness. She reminded her readers that American racial discrimination was on public display to international students, many of them in the US through the generosity of Methodist women's scholarship programs, whenever they were “attending church, traveling by means of public transportation, eating in restaurants and attending movies.”Footnote 63 Her reference to Little Rock not only suggests that the story of the Little Rock Nine spread to the South Pacific, but Little Rock and the racism it represented further served as an axis around which America's shame rotated. The reality of racial discrimination, which was not limited to Southern communities, was a disgrace presented to the world and established America as no better than apartheid South Africa.
Importantly, Wilson's assertions are distinguished from race reformers outside the church by their lack of reference to political or democratic change. Her critique did not become an argument for the justification of civil rights as an end in itself, but rather looked to the granting of civil rights as a step toward the mission vision of “world fellowship.” The absence of equal civil rights delayed the ultimate aim of Christian mission—the building of God's Kingdom. It was this aspiration of creating a Christian fellowship that underscores the fundamental influence of Christian vocation and faith as African American women in mission engaged racism and Jim Crow in America and abroad. As they carried this vision of mission into the global field, African American women missionaries joined the struggle for racial justice in the United States with the struggles for justice of the world's marginalized, thereby transforming the international mission field into a field of racial challenge.
V. Conclusion: “That's What I Felt to Do”
Josephine Beckwith moved to Kansas City, Kansas when she was 5 years old. Abandoned by their husband and father, Beckwith's mother brought her daughter to Kansas City to be near the hospital that would treat Josephine for the crippling effects she suffered as a result of polio. They moved into the house at 123 Rainbow Road, in an integrated neighborhood where neighbors were poor, “but all good friends.” While her neighborhood was integrated, the city schools were not, and Josephine vividly recalls her white neighbors being picked up by the school bus as she took the streetcar through Kansas City, Missouri and back again to Kansas so she could attend the school for African American children. Two years before starting at National College, while still living on Rainbow Road, Beckwith rounded up a group of young boys who were constantly getting into trouble. She got them to form a club, organize a basketball team, and get involved in the community youth program; they called themselves “The Rainbow Merry-Makers.”
Beckwith used this narrative to explain to the Methodist Board of Missions her philosophy of and calling to home missionary work. Life on Rainbow Road presaged a career as home missionary during the middle decades of the twentieth century when Beckwith understood her missionary work as a way of “helping . . . people to understand each other” and to “really absorb what was going on in the world.” Reflecting at the age of ninety-eight on her life's work Beckwith maintained, “it's what I felt to do. I didn't think of doing anything else.”Footnote 64 Getting a missionary education at National College, serving as the Christian representative in a faith trio in Philadelphia, eliminating cooking classes from a community center curriculum, establishing a community center in a residential neighborhood in Savannah, and retiring as Center Administrator in 1975 were thus the natural flow of her life's trajectory, giving purpose to Beckwith's education “related to religious experiences”—even when that required breaking racial barriers along the way.
In this light, it should come as no surprise that Beckwith saw her work as only indirectly influenced by the Civil Rights movement and asserted the people she worked with were more concerned with their day-to-day needs than with political matters. Similarly, DeLaris Johnson believed her missionary service could not at all be related to political movements because of the separation of church and state. And although there was intention behind wearing the sari, Ellen Barnette laughed at the thought of wearing one as a political statement; she and her white friends were just having fun tormenting the older white missionaries and confusing villagers.Footnote 65 These women's denials of connections between their work and civil rights activism point to the impact and influence of received narratives of The Civil Rights Movement on historical memory. Bound by a story told in male leadership, Supreme Court decisions, and voter registration campaigns, it is difficult to conceive of eliminating cooking classes from a community center or mixing up racial identities by wearing a sari as having any relation to such a monumental movement.Footnote 66
Yet, the missionaries’ denial of connections does not negate the social and political ramifications of their service. Rather, it serves to underscore my point here: the frame of reference for these African American women working in a world where racism and segregation was becoming increasingly intolerable was their Christian faith and missionary vocation. As they learned in their missionary training, their work was for the building of “world friendship” and “world brotherhood” and in mid-twentieth century America this could only happen as racial boundaries were confronted and challenged to their utmost. Thus, African American women missionaries went to the international and domestic fields equipped to convert people to a mindset that would foster cooperation and equality and, in turn, they crafted a mission practice that resembled civil rights activism yet drew on the optimism of their vocation rather than the pledges of the Constitution.
Perhaps, then, Beckwith's description of missionary work as a “leavening force” is more apt for this era than one might think. Yeast works invisibly and persistently, transforming a lump of dough through its living, vital presence. The service and presence of African American women missionaries in the civil rights decades functioned similarly. Their challenges to segregation and contributions to the civil rights struggle went unseen by many at the time in spite of the transformative effect of their vital presence. And while the links between their mission work and race reform have remained unseen, this essay is hopefully one step toward their recovery.
