Betsey Stockton was the first single woman missionary in the modern missions movement. Born into slavery in 1798, she was encouraged to learn and attend night classes at Princeton Theological Seminary. Upon her emancipation, Stockton pursued missions and set off for Hawaii in 1822, becoming the first known African American woman in the Hawaiian Islands. Stockton learned the Hawaiian language and established a school on Maui, later serving in Canada and Phliadelphia, Pennsylvania.
You can find more information on Betsey Stockton at BlackPast.org or via IMB.org’s Missionaries You Should Know series.
George Liele came to Christ in 1773 and preached for two years in the slave quarters of plantations surrounding Savannah and into South Carolina after his conversion. Liele was the first ordained African American and the first Baptist missionary to any land. He landed in Jamaica in January of 1773, serving for 10 years before William Carey (who is often mistakenly credited as the first Baptist missionary) set sail for India in 1783. By 1814, there were 8,000 Baptists in Jamaica, setting the stage for openly challenging the system of slavery. Liele died in 1828, not living to see the eradication of slavery in Jamaica in 1838.
For more information on Liele’s life and impact, visit his entry in IMB.com‘s series Missionary’s You Should Know or his biography in Boston University’s History Of Missiology section.
“Maria (Ma-rye-ah) Fearing was born into slavery in Alabama. In 1838, the year she was born, it was illegal to teach either enslaved or free people of color how to read. By the time of her death in 1937, she would have a hand in helping bring the Gospel—including a Bible in the Baluba-Lulua language—to the Congo. Born into the unjust institution of American chattel slavery, she would spend half of her adult life championing the cause of orphans who would call her ‘Mamu Fearing’ or ‘Mama wa Mputu’ (Mother from Far Away).” – Jasmine L. Holmes, Carved in Ebony
More information about Fearing (and other stories of how Black women have defined American Christianity) can be found at carvedinebonybook.com, where you can purchase the book or listen to the podcast (Maria Fearing episode linked below).
You can also visit the Alabama Women’s Hall of Fame’s article on Maria Fearing here.
Born in Maryland to Susan Coker, a white indentured servant, and Edward Wright, a black enslaved father. Daniel Coker was only allowed to attend school as a valet to his white half-brothers. He later fled to New York where he became an ordained Methodist minister. After friends in Maryland helped him buy his freedom, he was able to speak more openly against the institution of slavery. He helped found the African Methodist Episcopal Church (the first denomination in the US to be founded by people of African ancestry), as a response to racial discrimination in the Methodist Church before the Civil War. He eventually moved to Africa (present-day Liberia) as a missionary.
For more information, check out this profile of Daniel Coker on blackpast.org.
