The Women’s Missionary Council of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (MECS) chose Augusta Georgia for Miss Dee’s missionary work among the Blacks. Clearly, that location was chosen because Paine College was located there.
Paine College had been founded in 1882 by the leadership of the MECS, one of the predecessors of the present-day United Methodist Church, and the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, which by name change is now the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. Each denomination appointed three of the six-member board of trustees. Paine College was the brainchild of Bishop Lucius Henry Holsey, who first expressed the idea for the College in 1869. Bishop Holsey asked leaders in the MECS to help establish a school to train Negro teachers and preachers so that they might in turn appropriately address the educational and spiritual needs of the people newly freed from the evils of slavery. Leaders in the ME Church South agreed, and Paine Institute came into being. Paine was under the leadership of white presidents for many years.
It is interesting to note that the school was named in honor of Bishop Robert Paine, who had owned plantations in Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi. He had played a role in the division of the Methodist Church on the issue of slavery in 1844. It is also interesting that La Place Methodist Church in Macon County, where Miss Dee had joined at age eleven was also originally named Paine Chapel in honor of Bishop Paine, according to a talk that Miss Dee made at the La Place on the occasion of its centennial celebration in 1934.
The choice of Augusta, where Paine was located was quite natural, and the decision drew on actual experience. Miss Estelle Haskin, the faculty member who championed Miss Dee’s desire to become a missionary to Blacks, had established a somewhat similar mission to Blacks in Nashville in 1894. Fisk University assisted in that effort. And Miss Dee worked with that project in Nashville while attending and serving on the Methodist Training School and while awaiting her assignment to Augusta.
Miss Dee served on the faculty at Paine while working with students and faculty at Paine to establish the Bethlehem Center. She taught English at Paine College. She was chosen to lead the high school division at Paine. Teaching at Paine was her first experience on a College faculty, but would not be her last. The teaching experience at Paine appears to have pointed her in the direction of teaching at the college level. In 1916, while still teaching at Paine, Miss Dee enrolled in the Master’s Degree program at Peabody College in Nashville in Summer School. That training would be part of her preparation for teaching at Oklahoma University and Texas Tech.
Paine College has produced many notable alumni. Among them are Mike Thurmond, superintendent Dekalb County School District, Louis Lomax, the first African American TV Journalist, Woodie W. White, a Bishop in the United Methodist Church, John Wesley Gilbert, archaeologist, educator, and Methodist missionary to the Congo, who was the first graduate of Paine College, the first African-American professor of the school, and the first African-American to receive an advanced degree from Brown University, Frank Yerby, a writer, Joseph Lowery, minister in the United Methodist Church and leader in the civil rights movement who founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference along with Martin Luther King Jr., Shirley McBay, a gifted mathematician, who served as dean for Student Affairs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1980 to 1990, and Emma Gresham, teacher and politician who was mayor of Keysville, Georgia.. These alumni demonstrate the contributions of Paine College. Along with hundreds of other alumni, these had diverse gifts, and used them well. Each of them can be found on an internet search. Miss Dee made her contribution to the educational efforts of Paine College.
With regards to her personal efforts, perhaps the most poignant story of an alumnus is that of Charles G. Gomillion, who was to have a significant role in Macon County History, and his story deserves its own essay!
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