HOOD, James Walker, A. M. E. bishop, born in Kennett township, Chester County, Pennsylvania, 30 May, 1831. His family was included in the thirteen that founded a separate colored Methodist church in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1813. Subsequently his father lived upon a farm owned by Ephraim Jackson, to whom he verbally bound his children. In 1860 James was made deacon and sent as a missionary to Nova Scotia, serving there again after being ordained elder in 1862. In 1863 he was stationed in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and in that year sent to North Carolina as the first colored missionary to the freedmen of the south. He was a member of the reconstruction conventions of North Carolina in 1867-'8, and assistant superintendent of public instruction from 1868 till 1871. He was consecrated bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal church in 1872, and presided at one session of the Centennial conference in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1885. He has devoted his attention to church work, building five hundred churches in twenty years, and has held many offices in benevolent associations. Lincoln university gave him the degree of D. D. in 1887. He edited "The Negro in the Christian Pulpit," the only book of sermons published by a colored Methodist minister or bishop (Raleigh, 1884).