The thing that is remarkable about Miss Christine De Bardebelen is not that she attended The Methodist Training School and was trained for missionary work in 1910, but how she used that training. All accounts give Miss Dee credit for establishing the very first mission for the Women’s division of the Methodist Episcopal Church South for Blacks in the South. The Methodist Women ultimately assigned the name “Bethlehem Center,” to this mission, and to all such missions established for Black communities. She established that first Bethlehem Center, with help from students and faculty at Paine College, in 1912.
Augusta was chosen, in part because Augusta was the location of Paine College, that had been established in Augusta in 1882 as a joint effort of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and The Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, a Black denomination.
As mentioned in an earlier post in this series, in her article in the Alabama Journal in 1960, Katherine Tyson credited Miss Dee for starting the “first social center for Negroes in the south.” Barbara Campbell, a worker in the United Methodist Church, writing in 2010, also credited Miss Dee with starting the first Bethlehem Center.
However, in fairness, a little more needs to be said about this type of mission work. In Nashville, where Miss Dee attended Methodist Training School, there is mission ministry that is now called a Bethlehem Center, that has a history going back to 1894. It apparently does work very similar to the work started at the Bethlehem Center in Augusta. It was started in 1894, by none other than Sara Estelle Haskin, together with Sallie Hill, an African-American woman and a Fisk graduate. But it was apparently referred to initially as a “settlement project,” not a “Bethlehem Center. Barbara Campbell provides the following excellent explanation about the dynamics that were involved:
Women of southern Methodism experienced severe criticism and opposition to their settlement house plans from pastors and other church leaders. The word settlement had come to mean non-evangelical or even non-Christian.
Recognizing the term settlement house was troublesome, Belle Bennett, president of the Woman’s Board in 1906, recommended a change of names. Wesley House was selected and used almost exclusively until settlement work was undertaken in African-American communities in cities where Wesley Houses were already established.
Bethlehem Center or Bethlehem House became the official, distinguishing title in African-American communities. The women categorized these projects as “City Missions-USA” or “Other Social-Evangelistic Work.”
By 1940, more than two dozen Wesley Houses served such groups as Italian workers in Alabama steel plants; Cubans, Puerto Ricans and Italians in Florida cigar factories; and Austrian, Bohemian, Polish and French seasonal workers in the oyster and shrimp fisheries in Mississippi.
Thus Bethlehem Center was the name adopted for “social evangelistic work” for blacks, and “Wesley Houses” the name for similar ministries for other racial groups in the south.
The Methodist Episcopal Church, South had separated from the Methodist Church in 1844 over the issue of slavery. It reunited with the Methodist Church in a 1939 merger. The denomination became the United Methodist Church in 1968, as the result of merger with the Evangelical United Brethren denomination, another Wesleyan denomination.
As we have seen, Miss Dee finished Methodist Training School in Nashville in 1910. But she did not start the Bethlehem Center in Augusta until the fall of 2012. You will recall that, based on her interview with Miss Dee, Katherine Tyson reported that “(a)ll but one member of the faculty insisted she train for the Orient. This one, a Field Work Supervisor, understood Miss DeBardeleben’s feelings about working in her own country, and assigned her to a Negro church to teach the Bible to women.” And you will recall that Sara Estelle Haskins was included in the faculty for the Methodist Training School for Miss Dee’s class of 1910. And that she was also co-founder of the settlement project for Negroes in Nashville that is now known as a Bethlehem Center. No doubt, she was the faculty member who supported Miss Dee’s ambitious idea.
Miss Dee’s box that came into my possession, as explained in the introductory essay, included an account of the 1940 death of Estelle Haskin, that recognized the significant role that she played in organizing the work of Methodist Women. She was deeply involved in the work of Unification of North and South at the time of her death. Miss Dee would be very pleased that in this post, I am giving this the well-earned credit to the leadership of Sara Estelle Haskin, which does not detract in the least from the courageous, groundbreaking work of Miss Dee herself.
The record of the meeting of the Women’s Missionary Council of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, included the following:
“Extension Work. –The work for the betterment of negro women and girls has been greatly enlarged this year by the going of Miss Mary De Bardeleben, Extension Secretary of Negro Work, to Augusta, Ga. In her contact with Bible Study classes she has been enabled to organize teach-training classes and not only in connection with Paine College, where naturally she is located as headquarters, but she has succeeded in organizing a Civic League among the colored people themselves, which looks to cleaning up their cabin homes, and the employment of a trained nurse to visit among their own sick. The officials of the city of Augusta have rallied to this Civic Improvement League, and by making Miss De Bardeleben herself a legal inspector have given her authority to order material improvement to rented property and the cleaning of such homes as are bound to be sources of infection and demoralization. There must be regular headquarters for the extension negro work.”
Miss Dee was greatly assisted in her efforts by students and faculty at Paine College. She continued at Paine College through the 1917-1918 academic year, and continued her missionary work with Blacks. She suffered some illness in 1913, that apparently interfered with her work, but remained on the faculty at Paine. Others, including significant Black leaders, became involved in carrying out the mission of the Bethlehem House in Savannah.
Obviously. her work at Paine inspired further academic work, and turned her career toward teaching.
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