This Week in Texas Methodist History  October 27,

The Texas Council of Methodist Missionary Women Holds Organizational Meeting in Waco, October 1938

One of the often overlooked pan-Texas Methodist organizations is the Texas Council of Methodist Missionary Women, founded in Waco in October 1938.  The organizational meeting attracted the President, Secretary, and Christian Social Relationship Superintendent from  the Texas, West Texas, Central Texas, North Texas, and North West Texas Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church South. 

Methodist women in Texas had been instrumental for decades in lifting up progressive causes and urging more involvement in social action in both foreign and domestic missions.   They educated themselves and the rest of the denomination on a wide variety of issues.  Among their emphases were industrial safety, maternal and neonatal health, anti-lynching, rural poverty, public health, and social services to migrant workers.   The overwhelming issue, though, was the prohibition of the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages,  The “white ribbon” campaign had been the defining issue for a generation of women progressives in the denomination. 

By 1938 a younger cadre of leadership was expanding the vision of social action to a greater emphasis on race relations.  The Dry faction had been successful in imposing national prohibition of alcoholic beverages, but that victory had proved short-lived.  In Texas the battle over alcohol after repeal had turned into hundreds of local option battles rather than a state wide crusade. 

Armed with decades of lobbying experience on the issue of alcohol, the women now created a state wide organization to build on that experience and start lobbying to improve the status of African Americans in Texas. 

Eventually the organization turned its attention to providing equal funding for African American and white schools in Texas and for supplying the same textbooks to schools of both races.   The practice of the era was to buy new textbooks for the white students and giving the outdated texts to the African Americans.

At the organizational meeting in October 1938 they took a more cautious first step.  Their first lobbying effort was for the state to subsidize African American Texans who were forced to leave the state for medical, dental, or law school.  

African American Texans were denied admission to all the state owned professional schools.  If an African American Texan wanted to become a doctor, dentist, of lawyer, he or she had to go out of state.  Going out of state to such an institution as Meharry Medical School in Nashville involved considerable expensive even for the most talented student.  

The TCMMW began a lobbying campaign to get the Texas Legislature to appropriate funds so that African American Texans could get the professional education so badly needed in Texas.   The amount needed for such a noble purpose would be a small part of the state budget, but would pay such huge dividends. 

The TCMMW was an effective organization and laid the foundation for continuing involvement in lobbying for social issues.  United Methodist Women from all the conferences in Texas still go to Austin every legislative session to lift up Christian social concerns.