An organization that operated for more than two decades and promoted mission schools and evangelism among the Black people in the Southern states. It was a volunteer project supported by the sale of publications and by contributions from the church at large; later it merged with conference organizations. It was founded by J. Edson White and composed originally of the group of missionary recruits whom he gathered and transported down the Mississippi on his riverboat Morning Star. The founders of the Southern Missionary Society reached Vicksburg, Mississippi, in January 1895 under the instruction of, and bearing the credentials of, the General Conference. After about two years the Morning Star moved to Yazoo City, Mississippi, and work opened there. From that time on, the society carried on its work at Vicksburg and Yazoo City and intermediate river points, and aimed to give greater unity and solidity to the work in the South, particularly among Blacks. The object of the society, as stated in the Gospel Herald, was “to carry the principles of Christian education to the people of the South” (December 1899, p. 105). To avoid costly mistakes and provide for greater efficiency the society, begun informally by these missionary workers, held regular councils, in which plans were laid for different lines of work.
Although the boat was used as a base, it was necessary to purchase land for children’s homes, industrial schools, and church buildings; and because of prejudice against the Northern White person who came to teach the Southern Black, it was necessary to buy land and build homes to house the workers. In order to hold and manage such properties, the society became a corporation in 1898, chartered by the state to hold all necessary property under its name and to conduct all business operations through its regularly elected officers. The incorporation was approved by Ellen White, who counseled the society that men whom God had led to pioneer a new work should organize so as to place the work under the management of those who had borne its burdens and who understood its necessities ( ibid. , p. 104).
F. W. Halladay, F. H. Schramm, C. W. Smouse, J. E. White, and F. R. Rogers formed the first Board of Directors. J. E. White was elected president. In 1899 they added two new directors, E. A. Sutherland and P. T. Magan, and appointed F. H. Schramm business manager for the health food enterprise to be known as the Dixie Health Food Company. Stock in the corporation, limited to 10,000 shares, was made available to all at $1 a share. Some 3,200 share certificates were printed by the spring of 1900.
The sale of stock, however, was far from adequate to support the work. From time to time urgent appeals in behalf of various missionary projects were made in the columns of the organ of the society, the Gospel Herald. (For the two successive journals of that name, see Gospel Herald .) White produced several books especially for the support of the activities of the society, from which all royalties were donated to its projects. These books, which sold widely, were The Gospel Primer, by J. E. White and W. O. Palmer; Christ Our Saviour , by Ellen White; and The Coming King, Best Stories From the Best Book, and The Story of Joseph, all three by J. E. White. Some of these were published in four languages. About the end of 1900 the society headquarters and the Herald Publishing Company were established in Nashville, Tennessee.
The educational work was headed by F. R. Rogers, from the Pacific Coast. At Yazoo City the work was carried on in a movable chapel and a school built in sections. Rogers and his wife began the school there with 200 to 240 elementary pupils, including adults. In this school, which was known as the “holy school,” the pupils studied the ABCs, The Gospel Primer, The Gospel Reader, Christ Our Saviour, Patriarchs and Prophets , and the Bible. When because of local opposition the White teachers were replaced by Blacks, Rogers became the superintendent of instruction for the Southern Missionary Society in the state of Mississippi.
Other society workers in Mississippi included J. W. Darner, who directed a school for the Blacks at Columbus, Mississippi, in 1902; at Yazoo City W. H. Sebastian, who did house-to-house missionary work, while Mrs. Sebastian and a man named Murphy directed the school; M. C. Strachan and his wife, who worked for the Blacks in Jackson, where a school was begun also in 1902, with one child, but in one year the enrollment reached 25 to 30 and a company of 11 converts was prepared for organization; N. B. King and Mrs. L. C. Roby, who were in charge of the Black schoolwork at Vicksburg at this time (both former public school teachers at Yazoo City who became SDA s there). The schools resulted in the formation of a number of churches. At Brookhaven one man, who had accepted the SDA message by reading, gained a following of 12, whereupon Strachan came to help at Brookhaven.
When, at the General Conference in April 1901, nine Southern states, known then as the General Conference District No. 2, were organized into the Southern Union Conference, the Southern Missionary Society was accepted as a branch of the new union. This secured for the society additional moral support and cooperation, though the infant union conference, not even self-supporting, was unable to provide financial help. In 1906, when White retired, the society was incorporated more closely with the union, with G. I. Butler, the union president, as board chair.
The society, which had begun in Mississippi and had extended its activities to Tennessee, became responsible for the Black work in all the territory south of and including Kentucky and east of the Mississippi River. The ministers were to be supported by the tithe in the local conferences, and the mission schools by the society’s funds, received from contributors throughout the country. In practice, since only three of the Southern conferences were self-supporting at that time, the society furnished ministerial help also.
The society’s work prospered. In 1908 F. R. Rogers reported in the Gospel Herald that there were 18 schools, averaging nine-month terms, in nine different states, employing 27 teachers and enrolling a total of 600 pupils. A later issue of the same journal (October 1908, p. 38) observed that the society maintained 28 mission schools with an enrollment of nearly a thousand pupils, a number exceeding “that of the students in the three great colored universities of Nashville, viz., Fisk, Roger Williams, and Walden.” These schools aimed at giving a practical education to children and older illiterates, teaching them to read the Bible and paving the way for the direct presentation of Seventh-day Adventist doctrines in Bible studies.
The society was worth $16,211.26 in 1908; its indebtedness at that time was only $2,684.32, consisting almost entirely of trust funds. It held all its school and church buildings free from debt, and was able to establish treatment rooms and a mission home in Nashville for Blacks, replacing earlier treatment rooms there (1901–1903).
When in 1909 the General Conference established the North American Negro Department, it was recommended that the work for Black people be organized on a mission basis on the union level. The Southern Union Conference, from which the Southeastern Union Conference had been separated in 1908, set up the Southern Union Mission, operating under the name of the Southern Missionary Society. This took “over all work and workers for the colored people heretofore maintained by the several local conferences and by the Union Conference, excepting the school at Oakwood,” and received the tithe and other funds from all the Black churches in the area ( Gospel Herald, June 1909, p. 27; cf. November 1909, p. 45). In the Southeastern Union Conference, the Union Negro Mission Department was organized. These were forerunners of the present South Central and South Atlantic conferences.
The society’s mission schools were eventually replaced by church schools, in which the SDA faith was taught more directly, and the work of the society was gradually absorbed by the regular conference organizations. However, the groundwork done by the Southern Missionary Society prepared the way for today’s progress in the South.