This Week in Texas Methodist History Ocotber 30 Fifty-eighth Session of Texas Conference of MEC Meets at Boynton Chapel, Houston, October 31-Nov. 3 , 1923 The Methodisty Epsicoapl Church was excluded from Texas during the Civil War, but in 1865 the work resumed. On Christmas Day 1865 an organizational meeting was held in New Orleans to create a new annual conference whose boundaries would include the states of Texas, Lousiana, and Mississippi. In January 1867 Texas was severed from that conference to assume its status as its own annual conference. Work among African Americans spread quickly in Texas and before a decade passed, Texas was able to support two annual conferences, the Texas and the West Texas. Those conferences continued with almost no alterations to their boundaries until General Conference action of 1968 abolished the race-based annual conferences. From October 31 to November 3 the Texas Annual Conference met in Boynton Chapel MEC in Houston. It was presided over by Bishop R. E. Jones of the New Orelans area. On Wednesday, the third day of the conference, Bishop Isiah B. Scott entered the church to tremendous applause. A word of explanation is in order. Although the MEC organized African American Confences in the United States during the Reconstruction Era, those confernces were presided over by European- American bishops. There were African American MEC bishops, but they were designated as “Missionary Bishops” and presided over conferences outside the United States such as the famous Liberia Confernce. The MEC General Conference of 1920 changed that rule and two African American Methodist preachers were elected who had the authority to preside over domestic confernces. Those two new bishops were Jones and Scott. Jones had been elected from his post as editor of the denominational newspaper published in New Orleans and Scott from an academic post. They were joined in Houston by three ofther African Ameerican Mehtodists preachers who became even more prominent in later years. Matthew Dogan was president of Wiley College in Marshall, the jewel in the crown of the conference. Dogan had become president of Wiley in 1896 when the former president I. B. Scott had been named editor of the Advocate. Dogan was to remain president until his retirement in 1942. He was a delegate to every General Confeerence from 1904 to 1940. Another college president was also there---Willis King of Gammon in Atlanta, Georgia. King was to be elecced bisop in 1944. King’s visit trip to Houston and the Texas Conference was a homecoming. He had received deacon’s orders in the Texas Conference in 1908. He was ordained elder in 1913 and served churches in Greeville, Gavesotn, and Houston. The Houston appointment was to Trinity in1918 and he went to Gammon from that appointment. The third prominent preacher also held a doctorate from Boston University—J. L Farmer. In 1923 he was a Rust College in Mississippi but would later come to Texas at both Wiley and Samuel Huston College. His son, James Farmer became even more famous as the founder of CORE. Both Farmers, Senior and Junior are portrayed in the hit movie, The Great Debaters. What an exicitng annual conference that brought together such a distinguished group of preachers!