James Walker Hood (May 30, 1831 – October 30, 1918) was an African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (AME Zion) bishop in North Carolina from 1872 to 1916. Before the Emancipation Proclamation, he was an active abolitionist, and during the American Civil War he went to New Bern, North Carolina where he preached for the church to the black people and soldiers in the area. He was very successful and became an important religious and political leader in North Carolina, becoming "one of the most significant and crucial African American religious and race leaders during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries". By 1887 he had founded over six hundred churches in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina and erected about five hundred church buildings. He was politically and religiously ac