Black history: African American Christian missionaries
TL;DR:
This page highlights African American contributions to world missions, especially events in missions history that occurred during February, now observed as Black History Month. The page notes historic milestones such as Betsey Stockton’s 1823 voyage to Hawaii, the 1828 death of missionary Lott Cary in Liberia, Eliza George’s 1913 departure for Liberia, and Marilyn Lewis’s mobilization work in 2000.
It happened on this date in February
Many significant events involving African American missionaries have occurred in February, which is observed as Black History Month.
Black Christian missionaries have come from various Christian denominations and backgrounds.
Black evangelical missionaries have served in various world areas, including countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Caribbean, Central America, and the Pacific Islands, as well as among Indigenous peoples in the Americas.
Celebrating Black History Month With Global Missions Involvement
What people of one racial/ethnic background are doing to fulfill the Great Commission:
Significant missions events in February involving African Americans
February 1, 1823 — Betsey Stockton, a young
Black woman traveling with 13 white missionaries, was on board a ship rounding the southern
tip of South America. The missionaries were on their way to the Sandwich Islands (present-day
Hawaii). They had left New Haven, Connecticut, in November, sent out by the American Board of
Commissioners of Foreign Missions, an agency at the forefront of American Protestantism's
burgeoning interest in foreign missions. Betsey Stockton was in the second group of missionaries
to go to Hawaii, the first having arrived two years before. Besides Stockton, there were six
couples and one unmarried man, three Hawaiian men, and a Tahitian. The trip took five months by
sea with no stopovers. Like others on board, Stockton kept a journal of the voyage and of her
first couple of months in Hawaii. She had joined the company partly as a missionary and partly as
a servant to one of the couples, Rev. and Mrs. Charles S. Stewart, who were expecting a child.
However, Betsey's contract with the American Board did make clear that she was not simply to
be a servant but was to share in the mission's primary work.
February 2, 1911 — During a morning
devotional hour at Central Texas College
in Waco, a teacher, Eliza George, had a vision of Black Africans passing before the judgment seat
of Christ. Weeping and moaning, many of them were saying, "No one ever told us You died for
us." A few years earlier, while a student at Guadalupe College, Eliza George had responded to an
invitation for volunteer missionary service. Now, she felt a vision was prodding her to go to
Africa. The college president tried to dissuade her: "Don't let yourself get carried away by that
foolishness. You don't have to go over there to be a missionary — we have enough Africa over
here." It would be two more years before Eliza George got up enough courage to leave her
teaching position and head to Liberia. In her resignation speech, she read an original poem: "My
African brother is calling me; Hark! Hark! I hear his voice . . . Would you say stay
when God said go?" On December 12, 1913, Eliza George
sailed from New York as a National Baptist missionary.
February 4, 1786 — John Marrant, a free Black man from New
York City, preached at
Green's Harbour, Newfoundland, from 2 Corinthians 13:5 to "a great number of Indians and
white people." Marrant ministered cross-culturally, preaching to the American Indians. He
eventually carried the gospel to the Cherokee, Creek, Catawba, and Chickasaw tribes.
February 5, 1884 — Evangelist and missionary
Amanda Berry Smith
(1837-1915) was
in Africa after having spent some time in India. In her journal entry for this day, she wrote,
"Second Gospel Temperance meeting. Surely the Spirit of the Lord is with us, and He is blessing
us greatly. Not so much liberty in speaking, but God is with us, and we are expecting great
things. Oh, Lord, for Jesus' sake, answer prayer, and send us the Holy Ghost to quicken and
revive us."
February 6, 1820 — Daniel Coker sailed from New York
headed to Africa together with 90 emigrants who were being sent by the Maryland Colonization Society to establish what would
become Liberia. Coker was specifically sent by the MCS as a missionary, although no particular
mission board was involved.
February 7, 1930 — In a service commemorating fifty years
of Congregational missions in Angola, the Galangue mission choir, under the leadership of Bessie McDowell,
introduced a new song. It was Bessie's own Ovimbundu translation of "Lift Ev'ry Voice and
Sing." African Americans called "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" — which had been
composed in 1900 by the brothers James Weldon and J. Rosamond Johnson — the "Negro
National Anthem." On this date, February 7, Henry Curtis McDowell, Bessie's husband, wrote to
African American supporters that "Galangue has made the first step, so far as I
know, in making 'Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing' the international anthem." The McDowells
had gone to Angola in 1917. Also, on this date in 1878, Andrew Cartwright from
North Carolina organized the first American Methodist Episcopal Zion church on the African
continent at Brewerville in Liberia.
February 8, 1847 — African American Robert Hill had
been appointed to accompany
some white missionaries to Africa. On December 17, 1846, they sailed from Providence,
Rhode Island for the coast of Africa. On this day, February 8, they arrived in Monrovia,
Liberia.
February 10, 1819 — Around this time, Moses Henkle
became acquainted with what
John Stewart, "Man of Color," was doing to found a mission among the Wyandott Indians at
Upper Sandusky, Ohio. Stewart, the first Methodist missionary to the Indians, had been
converted in 1815 while drunk in a Methodist meeting in Ohio. Henkle's work with Stewart gave
credibility to Stewart's ministry. The resulting publicity led to the organization of a Methodist
missionary society in 1819 in New York City.
February 12, 1865 — Presbyterian minister Henry Garnet
became the first African American
to preach a sermon in the U.S. House of Representatives. Born into slavery in Maryland in 1815,
Garnet escaped to New England with his father when he was nine years old. In 1852 Garnet
went to Jamaica as a Presbyterian missionary. Ill health forced his return to the U.S. in 1855,
where he became very active in the abolitionist movement. On this same date (February 12) in
1847, William Colley was born in Virginia as a slave. In 1875 he was sent as a Southern Baptist
missionary to Lagos, Nigeria.
February 13, 1824 — One hundred and five black
emigrants from the
U.S. arrived in Liberia on the ship Cyrus They were received by Lott Cary and Colin Teague, who had arrived
three years earlier to begin an era
of missionary expansion by American Negro Baptists. They were the first missionaries sent out
by a Black group, the Richmond African Baptist Missionary Society.
February 14, 1760 — Birth of Richard Allen, founder in 1816
of the African Methodist
Episcopal (AME) denomination. By 1886, the Church was the world's largest denomination of
African Americans. It had more than four hundred thousand members, nearly three thousand
ordained ministers, more than three thousand church buildings, and had sent missionaries to
Haiti, San Domingo, and Africa. In 1893 AME headquarters received a request from a group of
Afro-Cubans to send missionaries to their island.
February 15, 1859 — Death of John Day (born: 1797), Southern Baptist missionary to
Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Central Africa, as well as one of the founding fathers of the country of
Liberia. During his thirteen years in Africa, Day estimated he had preached to about 10,000
"heathen."
February 16, 1922 — About this date, Jamaican-born
Montrose Waite received a letter from
the Christian and Missionary Alliance mission board saying they wanted to send him as a
missionary to Africa. Waite had won the battle against prejudice and rejection and even friends
who urged him to stay in the U.S., his adopted country. Waite would serve as a missionary in
Sierra Leone and Liberia and would be instrumental in founding the Afro-American
Missionary Crusade (1947) and the Carver Foreign Missions organization.
February 18, 1797 — Birth of John Day, a "free person of
color" who emigrated to Liberia in
1830 as a participant in the American Colonization Movement. In 1836 he became a missionary
for the Triennial Convention of the American Baptists. When the Southern Baptist Convention
was formed in 1845, its foreign mission board appointed Day as superintendent of Liberian
missions, a post he held until his death in 1859. Day also signed the Declaration of
Independence of Liberia in 1847. In addition to his missionary work, he became Liberia's second
Supreme Court justice. His brother Thomas was a well-known cabinetmaker in North
Carolina.
February 19, 1829 — The Boston
Recorder newspaper reported the
death of African American missionary Lott Cary in Liberia. He
had died on November 10, 1828, after being mortally wounded in an accidental explosion while preparing ammunition to defend the colony. Of Cary,
the newspaper said, "Lott Cary was a worthy and useful Baptist preacher, himself a colored
man." Born a slave in Virginia, Cary became a Christian while in Richmond. He purchased his
freedom, became a lay exhorter, and then a licensed Baptist preacher. He went to Liberia in the
early 1820s as one of the first American missionaries to the African continent. Also on this day
(February 19) in 1902, Levi Coppin from Maryland made his first trip to South Africa, the region
for which he had been appointed an AME bishop.
February 20, 2000 — A heart attack claimed the life of
Marilyn Lewis, a volunteer at the
United States Center for World Mission who helped lay the groundwork for their African
American Mobilization Division. A schoolteacher in Pasadena, CA, Marilyn often spoke of her
desire to serve as a missionary in Brazil, reaching the descendants of those who had come from
Africa. Just prior to her unexpected death, Marilyn had written a call-to-action article:
"Just look at an African American church today, and you can see testimony to our new era:
richly decorated, air-conditioned sanctuaries with carpeted floors are now quite common. Many
drive to church in the latest-model cars. Today, instead of working the tables at restaurants, many
African Americans own them. God has blessed us. Now it is time for the African American to
bless the world in evangelization efforts. In the past many African Americans cried because they
could not become involved in missionary work. But now the doors are wide open, and we are
without excuse."
February 22, 1880 — Moses Ladejo Stone was ordained into
the ministry in the First Baptist
Church, Lagos (originally known as American Baptist Church) by William W. Colley. Colley,
an African American, is thought to be the only person to have served as an appointed missionary
of both a white-administered missionary-sending agency and a Black-administered
missionary-sending agency. Colley began his missionary career in 1875. That year, he was
appointed by the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board to serve in West Africa as assistant to
W. J. David, a white missionary from Mississippi. In November of 1879, Colley returned to the
United States, convinced that many more Black people should be involved in international missions,
especially in Africa. As Colley traveled back and forth across the country, he urged black
Baptists to take an independent course in mission work and form their own sending agency.
Colley was the primary force in founding the Baptist Foreign Mission Convention (BFMC) in 1880.
February 23, 1814 — The foundation of the Baptist Mission
in Jamaica had been laid by a few Black and "coloured" men who had gone to the island from the U.S.A. in 1782. Some of
them had been slaves in the United States who had been granted liberty by their owners. Some
were Christians when they arrived in Jamaica, while others had been converted after their arrival.
The most noted were George Lisle (the first ordained Black minister in America), George Lewis, George
Gibb, and Moses Baker. It was chiefly through the urging of Moses Baker that the English
Baptist Missionary Society began missionary work in Jamaica. The first missionary sent from England in
response to Baker's pleas was John Rowe, who landed at Montego Bay on February 23, 1814.
February 24, 1840 — Evangelist George Brown, who established the Heddington mission station in Liberia, reported organizing a church among the Pessah people following the conversion of two tribal leaders, Baopgo and Peter, and 34 other people after a "God-palaver."
February 25, 1890 — By this time, William Sheppard, who
has been called the "Black Livingstone," was on his way to the Congo on the steamship Adriatic as a
Presbyterian missionary. Sheppard was sailing with white missionary Sam Lapsley.
Peter Claver became known by titles he used for himself: "Slave of the Blacks" and "Slave of the Slaves." A farmer's son
from Verdu in Catalonia, Claver studied at the University of Barcelona. At age 20, he joined the
Jesuits. Influenced by Alphonsus Rodriguez, Claver went to South America as a missionary.
He ministered to African slaves physically and spiritually when they arrived in Cartagena,
Colombia. It is estimated by some that Claver converted 300,000 African slaves to Christianity.
For 40 years, he worked for humane treatment on the plantations. Claver organized charitable
societies among the Spanish in America similar to those organized in Europe by Vincent de Paul.
Claver said of the slaves, "We must speak to them with our hands by giving before we try
to speak to them with our lips." Peter Claver died on September 8, 1654, at Cartagena,
Colombia, of natural causes.
Additional February dates needed
We would like to add February events involving the following African American missionaries and organizations. Can you help us locate February birth dates, anniversaries, missionary calls, departures for the field, deaths, or other significant milestones?
Virgil Amos
Virgil Lee Amos left the U.S. as a missionary in 1962. He and his family served with
Operation Mobilization in Spain, Belgium, England, India, Sri Lanka, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and
Afghanistan. In 1982, he founded Ambassadors Fellowship, a missionary-sending organization,
where he has trained primarily African Americans to serve where the gospel has not yet been widely proclaimed.
William Allan, Quaker
American Missionary Association
Efrain Alphonse was one of the great missionary pioneers of this century. Eugene Nida says
of Efrain Alphonse in his book, God's Word in Man's Language, "Of all the
missionary translators in the Western Hemisphere, probably no one has entered more fully into
the rich realms of aboriginal speech than this humble African American servant of God who
(worked) untiringly among a needy people."
John Baker with SUM
Donna Baptiste, missionary to Mali, West Africa 1992-1997
Scipio Bean (or Seipio Beanes), missionary to Haiti 1827
T.J. Bowen
Durmezier Charles, missionary from Haiti to Rwanda
Landon Cheek (1871-1964) Baptist missionary to Malawi from 1901 to 1906
Ruby Clarke, United World Mission
Daniel Coker (1780-1846), went in 1820 as a missionary to Sierra Leone and Liberia
Formation in 1998 of COMINAD (Cooperative Missions Network of the African
Dispersion)
Elizabeth Copeland, 1997, Philippines (Church of God in Christ)
Neyesa Costa (born February 23), missionary to Burkina Faso, 1979 (CMA)
Alexander Crummell moved to Liberia in 1853, where he spent 20 years as a missionary.
Emma Delaney, National Baptist Missionary (born January 3, 1871) in what is now Malawi and then Liberia
Alice Douglin, 40 years in the Congo
Gladys East, daughter of missionary James East, returned to South Africa in 1944.
Mrs. A. A. Fitts (neé, Bolden), Christian and Missionary Alliance missionary to
Sierra Leone in the early 1900s
Louise "Lulu" Cecilia Fleming: On January 10, 1886, Fleming became the first Black woman
to be appointed and commissioned for missionary service by the Women's Baptist Foreign
Missionary Society of the West. She attended Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina,
graduating in May, 1885. She left for Africa on March 17, 1887. During a furlough she studied
medicine and served in areas of the Congo (now Zaire) as a medical missionary.
David George went to Sierra Leone in 1790 alongside Hector Peters and Simpson Calvert to
establish the Free American Baptist Church.
Clara Howard, French Congo, 1890-1895 and Panama 1896-97
In 1782, when the British evacuated Savannah, George Lisle (also known as George Sharp)
went with the Loyalists who sailed to Jamaica in the West Indies. Two years after arriving, he
established the first Baptist Church on the sugar-growing island and eventually baptized over 400
free and slave Blacks.
A.L. Jones to Cape Palmas, Africa (1846)
Josephine Makil, the first African American to join Wycliffe Bible Translators
Wilondia and Shirley K. Wright Masongezi, serving with the Baptist General Conference in
the Ivory Coast as church planters among the Hausa people.
Carrie Merriweather from Cleveland, Ohio to Sierra Leone in 1913 with The Christian and
Missionary Alliance
Joseph Phipps began work in the Congo in 1895, including the translation of a dictionary.
James Priest, 1843 Liberia
J.H. Priestly, National Baptist Convention
John Bryant Small started mission stations and a school in Ghana in 1872 (AME).
Phyllis Shippy, founder of AARON — African Americans Reaching Out to Nations
Amanda Berry Smith (1837-1915), Africa
Darius Swann, China, 1953
Elgin and Dorothy Taylor with Christians in Action (Japan/Okinawa /
Africa). In 1959, Elgin and Dorothy became the first African American missionaries to be sent
to Asia. In 1982, Elgin in the photo at the right with a newly-drilled water well in Ghana, became
the first
Afro-American president and CEO of a multi-ethnic, cross-cultural, international missions
agency.
Mary Tearing, who went to the Congo at age 56
Eugene M. and Sadie Thornley, Christian and Missionary Alliance missionaries to Sierra
Leone in the early 1900s
James A. L. Trice, Sudan / Sierra Leone, 1889 or 1890 (Gospel Union and C&MA)
Montrose and Ella Mae Waite (and later his second wife, Anna Marie), Christian and
Missionary Alliance missionaries to Sierra Leone
Francis Watson of the Lott Cary mission established a mission station in the interior of
Liberia in 1920. He would later plant forty churches.
Prince Williams founds the Bethel Baptist Mission in Nassau, Bahamas in 1778
Ernie Wilson, credited as founder of the Afro-American Missionary Crusade (with
Waite?)
R.H. Wilson, Christian and Missionary Alliance missionary to Sierra Leone in early part of
the 1900s
Elgin and Dorothy Taylor with Christians in Action (Japan/Okinawa /
Africa). In 1959, Elgin and Dorothy became the first African American missionaries to be sent
to Asia. In 1982, Elgin in the photo at the right with a newly-drilled water well in Ghana, became
the first
Afro-American president and CEO of a multi-ethnic, cross-cultural, international missions
agency.
