Negro Bishops for White Areas

The quandary at the Methodist General Conference in Pittsburgh last May was when and how to integrate the all-Negro Central Jurisdiction. Being separate-but-equal, the Central Jurisdiction gave position and status to Negro clergymen, some of whom feared loss of jobs and rank if it were abolished. The conference settled for giving white jurisdictions a leisurely four years to plan for the incorporation of Negro churches.

Now, faster than anyone foresaw, the dilemma is being solved-- by giving the Negro clergymen more authority over white believers than men of their race have in any other Protestant church. By last week it was clear that outside the Deep South the Central Jurisdiction will be absorbed long before 1968.

Integration in Dallas. Two regional Methodist conferences made ecclesiastical history a fortnight ago by naming Negro bishops to head predominantly white areas. In Cleveland, delegates to a Midwest meeting voted 370 to 0 to incorporate Negro churches and pastors, and assigned Bishop James S. Thomas, 45, to head the Iowa area. A native of South Carolina, Bishop Thomas will have headquarters in Des Moines, govern 300,000 Methodists, all but 500 of them white. A few days earlier, in the Northeast, white Methodists also accepted Negro churches into their jurisdiction and appointed Bishop Prince Taylor Jr. of Baltimore to head a newly created New Jersey district. He will govern more than 600 churches with 200,000 members, only about 5% of them Negro. Next year he will succeed New York's Bishop Lloyd Wicke as president of the 92-member Council of Methodist Bishops.

Methodist wheels are grinding slowly toward integration even in the South. At Dallas, the regional conference asked for integration, and called upon the Council of Bishops to provide a Negro bishop as soon as the goal is achieved. White Methodist ministers in Dallas helped elect the Rev. Zan W. Holmes Jr., a Negro, to the presidency of the interdenominational Dallas Pastors' Association. Bishop John Wesley Lord of Washington will probably include three or four Negroes among twelve superintendents he will appoint next June.

Long Way to Go. "Methodism has taken an enormous leap forward," says the Rev. Ralph L. Roy, a leader of the reform-minded group called Methodists for Church Renewal, but "there is a long way to go." Most individual congregations remain segregated in practice, largely because of housing patterns. Moreover, few white churches are willing to accept a Negro pastor, and not many bishops seem ready yet to put their followers to that kind of test. Yet with Negroes joining the ranks of what Roy calls "the power people," that may soon change: "Where Negroes are bishops, they are the powers, the ones before whom ministers and congregations tremble."

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