Sara J. Hatcher Duncan (born October 5, 1869, Cahaba, Alabama, died July 18, 1906, Selma, Alabama) was an African- American social activist who was appointed President of the African Methodist Episcopal Church's Women's Home and Foreign Missionary Society in 1900. [1]
Duncan was born to a former slave, S. George Hatcher, as the youngest of four children. Her mother, Eliza English, was mixed-race and died shortly after Duncan's birth. Her family lived in relative prosperity and were of some local political importance; her grandfather Jordan Hatcher was the local postmaster, and had been a delegate at the 1868 Alabama Constitutional Convention.
Duncan was educated at the Presybeterian Knox Academy, Selma, Alabama, from 1881; she subsequently became a schoolteacher. In 1889 she married Robert H. Duncan, of Rome, Georgia. She continued her teaching career and became involved in missionary work. In 1896 she returned to Selma from Rome, and was involved in the foundation of the Women's Home and Foreign Missionary Society. Duncan served as superintendent between 1897 and 1900, and as president in 1900. [2] She founded a newspaper, the Missionary Searchlight in 1898.
Her later life is obscure but she wrote a book about the missionary activity of the A.M.E. Church in 1906. [3]
Clara Minter Parrish was an American artist from Alabama. Although she produced a large amount of work in a wide array of media, she is best known for her paintings and stained glass window designs. She was inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame in 1983.
Sarah Allen was an American abolitionist and missionary for the African Methodist Episcopal Church. She is known within the AME Church as The Founding Mother.
Mary Emilie Holmes was a 19th-century American geologist and educator who became the first woman to be elected a fellow of the Geological Society of America. She was also one of the cofounders of a seminary for young black women that evolved into Mary Holmes College, which was named in memory of her mother.
Sarah E. Gorham (1832–1894) was the first woman to be sent out as a missionary from the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Her life is not documented until 1880, when she visited family members who had moved to Liberia, presumably via the American Colonization Society. While there, she became interested in the people of the area and the programs of the missionaries. She has been described as a "missionary, church leaders, social worker". After this visit, she returned to the United States and was involved at the Charles Street African Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1888, at the age of 56, she went to the Magbelle mission in Sierra Leone, as the AME's first woman foreign missionary. At Magbele she established the Sarah Gorham Mission School, which gave both religious and industrial training. In July 1894 she was bedridden with malaria and died the next month. She was buried in the Kissy Road Cemetery in Freetown, Sierra Leone.
Eliza Ann Gardner was an African-American abolitionist, religious leader and women's movement leader from Boston, Massachusetts. She founded the missionary society of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (AMEZ), was a strong advocate for women's equality within the church, and was a founder of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs.
Solomon T. Clanton was a leader in the Baptist Church. He was educated in New Orleans and Chicago and became the first black graduate of the theological department at the Baptist Union Theological Seminary at Morgan Park, Chicago, Illinois, associated with the University of Chicago. He spent his career as an educator and leader in the Baptist Church. He served as a professor at Leland University, Alabama A&M University, and Selma University, and before his death as assistant librarian at the University of Chicago. He was acting president for a short time at Alabama A&M and was dean of the theological department at Selma University. During his career, he was also an educator in high schools and Sunday schools.
Sarah Dudley Pettey (1869-1906) was an African-American educator, writer, organist, and political activist in North Carolina. She devoted her life and career to increasing gender and racial equality, Christian temperance, and women's participation in the state's public sphere during the Jim Crow era.
Edward McKnight Brawley was an American educator and minister in North Carolina and South Carolina. He was the first African American to attend Bucknell University. He was an important figure in the development of the African-American church in South Carolina and the American southeast and helped found numerous churches and schools, including the Benedict Institute and Morris College. He served as president at Morris and, earlier, at Selma University. Later in his career he was a professor at Shaw University. He was also a prominent pastor at numerous churches and an important figure in civil rights and religious affairs.
Florence Spearing Randolph was an American clubwoman, suffragist, and ordained minister, pastor of the Wallace Chapel AME Zion Church in Summit, Union County, New Jersey, United States. from 1925 to 1946. She organized the New Jersey Federation of Colored Women's Clubs and was president of the New Jersey Women's Foreign Missionary Society.
Georgia Mabel DeBaptiste (1867–1951) was an African-American journalist, teacher and social worker from Chicago. After completing her education, she taught at various notable black schools before becoming the first woman of African descent to be employed at the Chicago Post Office.
Christine Shoecraft Smith was an African-American community worker began her career as the assistant principal of the Alabama State Normal and Industrial School. She married an AME minister, who would become a bishop in the church and assisted him as the manager of the press organ of the Sunday School Union. She worked in many clubs and served as the 13th president of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs (NACWC).
Annie Ryder Gracey was an American author and missionary of the long nineteenth century. She wrote two books based on her travels, Eminent Missionary Women and Woman's Medical Work in Mission Fields. The history of the literature produced by the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church was closely linked with Gracey, who served as chairman of the committee on literature, and created missionary literature for the Society.
Selina Huntington Bakewell Campbell was an important woman in the Restoration Movement, which is sometimes referred to as the Stone-Campbell Movement. She was the second wife of Alexander Campbell.
Joanna Patterson Moore was an American Baptist missionary. She was the first white woman missionary appointed by the Woman's American Baptist Home Mission Society, and worked predominantly among black communities of the American south. She founded a series of training schools, and helped organize women's societies. She also founded the monthly magazine Hope, promoting Biblical literacy.
Sara Griffith Stanley Woodward was an African-American abolitionist, missionary teacher, and published author. Sara, sometimes listed as "Sarah", came from a biracial family, of which both black and white sides owned slaves. Despite this fact, she spent most of her working life to further the cause of freedom and civil rights for African Americans. Her family's wealth and affluence enabled her to obtain a diploma in "Ladies Courses" from Oberlin College, the first college in the United States to admit African Americans beginning in 1835. She wrote and published several abolitionist works in journal magazines, but her most famous writing was an address on behalf of the Delaware Ladies' Antislavery Society given at the State Convention of Colored Men during the 1856 election year. After the Civil War, she spent several years working as a teacher for the American Missionary Association, working in the North and in the South educating African-American children.
Althea Maria Brown Edmiston was an African-American teacher and Presbyterian missionary, working in the Belgian Congo for more than thirty years. She compiled the first dictionary and grammar for Bushong, the language of the Kuba Kingdom.
Belle Harris Bennett led the struggle for and won laity rights for women in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. She was the founding president of the Woman's Missionary Council of the Southern Methodist Church. Much of her work including fundraising and organizational efforts to provide higher education for a new professional class of social workers and community organizers in the Southern Methodist Church in the U.S. and abroad. Her carefully collaborative support for African Americans and immigrants was considered radical at that time by Southerners. She was a suffragist and supporter of temperance as well.
Mary J. Small (1850–1945) was a reverend in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and was the first woman to achieve the position of elder.
Marie Louise Clay Clinton was an American educator, singer, and church leader, founder and superintendent of the Buds of Promise Juvenile Mission Society, under the Women's Home and Overseas Missionary Society (WH&OMS) of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.
Belle Caldwell Culbertson was an American author and philanthropist, active in social and religious reforms. She served as president, Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Presbytery of Washington City; president, Woman's Inter-Denominational Missionary Union of the District of Columbia; and president, Washington Auxiliary Mission to Lepers. Other positions included: Trustee, Anti-Saloon League; Trustee, International Reform Bureau; vice-president, Mothers' Congress of D.C.; and member, Executive Board, Woman's Christian Temperance Union (W.C.T.U.).