This Week in Texas Methodist History September 12 Biracial “A Conference on Human Relations” Held at Huston Tillotson, September 12-13, 1957. The General Board of Social and Economic Relations of the Methodist Church held a series of conferences on race relations in 1957. The first was in Chicago. Others were held in Kansas City, Indianapolis, Louisville, Pittsburgh, and Daytona Beach (site of Bethune Cookman). The 12th in the series was held in Austin at Huston Tillotson College. Huston Tillotson had recently been created by the merger of Methodist Samuel Huston College and Tillotson College, founded by Congregationalists. The specter of Brown v. Board of Education hovered over the conference, and one of the unspoken objectives of the conferences was to equip Methodists to provide a calming influence over the battles of public school desegregation that were already occurring in the United States The General Board had added prestige to the conferences by securing the attendance of the bishops of the region in which they were held. In Texas that meant that Bishops A. Frank Smith and W. C. Martin of the South Central Jurisdiction and Bishop Willis King of the Central Jurisdiction were participants for both days of the two day conference. The conference heard presentations from both General Board staff and local church leaders---all male leaders! Don Redmon (Secretary of the Steering Committee and San Antonio DS), Floyd Curl (Chair of the Steering Committee), I. M. Loud (vice chair of the Steering Committee), Marvin Judy, Merrimon Cuninggim, and James Mathews. Worship services were held in University Methodist Church whose pastor, Edmund Heinsohn whose intellectual prowess and progressive outlook was covered in a previous post. Future Bishops Ernie Dixon, Kenneth Pope, Chess Lovern, Eugene Slater, and Kenneth Copeland were all there. So too were the Lay Leaders and WSCS Conference presidents. The workshop materials and plenary addresses were published by the General Board. The final report includes not only the Austin materials, but also substantial reports form the several of the other 11 conferences. The plenary addresses are unremarkable. They are mainly boilerplate platitudes one would expect from such participants. What is remarkable are the published dialogues among the bishops and their responses to audience questions. Nowhere in the dialogue or presentation could I find an expectation that integration of the races would occur at the local church level. There was one exception mentioned in the report. An unnamed Methodist church in the South Central Jurisdiction passed a resolution stating that the pastor was directed to welcome all persons of all races who came forth for membership. (The Discipline stated at the time that the pastor was responsible for determining eligibility for church membership. Some denominations require a vote of the congregation for new members.) Most of the discussion about future desegregation dealt with institutions beyond the local church in the church institutions. Various examples were given of tentative steps toward biracial summer youth assemblies, educational institutes, and mission studies. The elephant in the room during the Q&A with the bishops were the Methodist colleges and universities. Not one of European American institutions was fully integrated. SMU had just admitted a small number of African American students into the Perkins School of Theology, but they were the only ones. Bishop Smith had been President of the Board of the SMU Trustees for 18 years so if anyone should have known about future plans for desegregation, it would have been him. He bragged on the admission of the few theology students. He also bragged that SMU was the first football team in the Southwest Conference to accept a football game against an opponent with an African American on the roster. One of the questions from the audience was “What is the attitude of the other members of the SMU Board toward desegregation?” Bishop Smith’s reply should go down in history as a classic evasion. Remember that Smith had been President of the Board for 18 years. He replied to the question “Well the question has never come up.”