This Week in Texas Methodist History  December 1

Emmet Jay Scott of Trinity Methodist Church in Houston, Recognized in Conference Resolution, December 1917        

The Texas Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church met in Orange during the first week of December, 1917.  Like all the rest of the nation, clergy and lay delegates were intensely interested in U. S. participation in World War I.   Delegates passed a resolution supporting the war specifically refuting the sentiment in some African American circles that “the Negro has nothing to fight for in this war.”  

Delegates saw African American doughboys in the tradition of those soldiers who “followed Roosevelt, Shafter, and Wheeler up San Juan Hill, and thus helped free bleeding Cuba.” 

The resolution also thanked Secretary of War Newton Baker for naming Emmett Jay Scott as his Special Advisor for Negro Affairs.  This made Scott the highest ranking African American in the Wilson administration.  (Wilson was well known for bringing Jim Crow segregation into the U. S. Government, including the Post Office.)

Scott was born in Houston in 1873 and was a part of the historic Trinity Methodist Church.  He attended Wiley College for three years, but left to work for the Houston Post, a white-owned newspaper.  Scott worked his way up from janitor to reporter at the Post, and in 1893 was a co-founder of the Texas Freeman, Houston’s first African American newspaper.  

His journalistic prowess gained the attention of Booker T. Washington so he moved to Tuskegee as Washington’s personal assistant, ghost writer, speech writer, and in 1912 as the Tuskegee Secretary-Treasurer.      

When Washington decided he could not be away from the U. S. for an extended period, Scott took his place on a delegation to Liberia to help create a new government there.  

One of Scott’s achievements in his World War I role was the accreditation of Ralph Waldo Tyler as the only journalist accredited by the War Department to report on African American soldiers in World War I.    Scott’s Official History of the American Negro in the World War, is still the starting point for researchers in the field of African Americans in World War I and is still available for purchase.  

After the war ended, Scott became Secretary –Treasurer of Hampton Institute.  When World War II broke out, he returned to the war effort, this time working for the Sun Shipbuilding Company of Chester, Pennsylvania.  

Scott died in 1957 in Washington, D. C.