Methodist History, 56:4 (July 2018) 211 ThE RuTh CARTER AuxILIARy: WOMEN’S SuppORT fOR pEOpLES COMMuNITy CENTER IN NEW ORLEANS 1 Ellen Blue The Ruth Carter Auxiliary is an organization of African-American wom- en who have provided support for the work of Peoples Community Center (PCC). Located in Central City, which is among the most dangerous and poorest areas of New Orleans, PCC excelled at early childhood education and provided vital services to its neighborhood throughout the twentieth cen- tury. It began as a mission of the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC). As Social Gospel practitioners, Methodist women established settlement houses and community centers (sometimes called institutional churches) across the U.S. at the turn of the twentieth century. PCC was founded as an institution- al church in 1922, but its worshipping congregation was administratively separated from the community center in 1925 because the newly-established Community Chest (a forerunner of United Way) would not fund work of individual congregations. In the 1930s, PCC operated a “nursery, a free em- ployment service, a kindergarten, a free children’s clinic, a welfare bureau with case work, a Boy Scout troop, and an adult education and recreation program.” 2 In 1939, a shameful compromise took place to help broker the reunif- cation of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (MECS)—which had bro- ken of from the MEC before the Civil War—with the MEC to form The Methodist Church. White congregations were grouped into geographic ju- risdictions, but all African-American congregations in the country were put into the segregated Central Jurisdiction. Thus, in Louisiana, there were two overlapping conferences: Louisiana Conference A and its white members belonged to its geographic jurisdiction and Louisiana Conference B and its black members belonged to the Central Jurisdiction. Even after these two conferences merged in 1971, white congregations in Louisiana tended to support St. Mark’s, a center in the French Quarter founded by MECS wom- en, leaving black congregations to provide most of the support for PCC. 3 PCC was still accomplishing much-needed work. In 1964, its budget 1 Adapted from a paper delivered at the Southern Historical Association, November 12, 2017, Dallas, TX. 2 Walter N. Vernon, Becoming One People: A History of Louisiana Methodism (Bossier City, LA: Commission on Archives and History, Louisiana Conference, 1987), 203. 3 Ellen Blue, St. Mark’s and the Social Gospel: Methodist Women and Civil Rights in New Or- leans, 1895-1965 (knoxville: U Tennessee P, 2011). Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/methodist-history/article-pdf/56/4/211/1325100/methodisthist_56_4_211.pdf by guest on 06 February 2022