Born on March 4, 1874, in Jasper County, Mississippi,1 Rachel “Anna” Knight was an African American Adventist missionary nurse, teacher, colporteur, Bible worker, and conference official. Her father, Newton Knight, was a White farmer and ex-Confederate soldier,2 and her mother, Georgeanne, who had been emancipated from slavery, was of racially mixed heritage. Anna lived with her extended family in a small, overcrowded house in the Knight community (called Six Town) in Mississippi.
Education at All Costs
Barred by race from attending the local school, Anna learned to read and write by bartering for books with her White cousins who attended school. Anna helped her cousins with their chores, and in exchange, they taught her how to read. She would go to the creek bed, smooth out the sand, and practice forming the letters of the alphabet in the sand with a stick. By the age of 14 she knew enough to teach other children. Using boards painted with wet soot as a blackboard, and with chalk from the creek bed, she wrote out the alphabet while the children sounded out the letters. Although her teaching style was primitive, it served its purpose, since no formal education was allowed for mixed-race children in that community.
When a salesman came to Six Town soliciting subscriptions for the Home and Fireside magazine, Anna subscribed, and then, after receiving the magazine, she sent in her name to receive free samples of additional magazines and other reading material. Eventually, in 1891, she received a copy of Signs of the Times from Edith Embree, who was part of a Young People’s Literature and Correspondence Band. Edith kept in touch with Anna, sending new issues of the magazine and an occasional letter, and after nearly six months of intensively studying the literature and Bible lessons Edith had sent her, comparing everything with the Bible, Anna resolved to be baptized and join the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
At this time the Adventist church nearest Anna’s home was located some 400 miles away, in Graysville, Tennessee, which is where she traveled for her baptism in late December 1892.3 A couple in Graysville named Chambers opened their home to Anna and arranged for her to attend the Adventist school, Graysville Academy. Because of her light complexion she initially gained admission, but when some parents ascertained her racial identity, they protested, and Anna was prohibited from attending classes. The school matron took Anna into her room, though, and taught her individually, while Anna assisted the matron with her work.
Despite their violent threats and harassment, Knight refused to be intimidated.
Anna’s first real opportunity for formal education came when the Chamberses arranged for her to attend Mount Vernon Academy in Ohio, beginning in September 1894. The following summer Anna served as cook for the camp meeting held in Chattanooga. Two medical missionary nurses, trained at Battle Creek Sanitarium, helped Anna plan healthy menus, and at their prodding she enrolled in the American Medical Missionary College, graduating as a missionary nurse in 1898.
Missions at Home and Abroad
After graduation Knight returned home to Mississippi, where she opened a mission school in a one-room log cabin near Gitano, not far from her home. Twelve students were enrolled, consisting mostly of her relatives in the Knight community who were still denied opportunity to attend the other schools in the area. Enrollment grew, and Knight also established two well-attended Sunday schools held in nearby churches. As a result of her descriptions of the dire effects of alcohol in her health and temperance lectures, local moonshiners saw a decline in demand for their illicit product. Despite their violent threats and harassment, Knight refused to be intimidated.
While at the General Conference Session in 1901, Knight accepted a call to accompany J. L. Shaw and his wife for missionary service in India, along with a second nurse, classmate Donna Humphrey. That fall Knight and her fellow workers set sail for Calcutta. She thus became not only the first African American female Seventh-day Adventist missionary sent anywhere, but also the “first black woman to be sent to India by a mission board of any denomination.”4
In India, Knight worked first as a nurse at a sanitarium in Calcutta before being called to the mission station at Karmatar that, along with a school, operated a small orphanage, a dispensary, and a printing press. There she served wherever needed—as a bookkeeper, teacher, nurse, and helper at the printing press, even planting a fruitful garden. Knight further branched out to take on new roles as a colporteur and Bible worker. The latter work became her top priority.
Knight’s six and a half years on the Indian subcontinent would take her to the cities of Calcutta, Allahabad, Simla, Amritsar, Ambala, Ludhiana, Jullundur, and Lahore, as well as to small villages. She became acquainted with the Hindi language and worked with the village people.
After receiving a two-year furlough in 1907, Knight returned home to rebuild the school that had been burned down by the moonshiners in 1903, and resumed her work as teacher. She also worked as a part-time Bible worker for the Mississippi Conference.
For the remainder of her career, Knight intermittently ran a small sanitarium and served as a Bible worker and education administrator in the American South. Working with prominent women of several denominations, Knight organized the first local YWCA in Atlanta, where were offered courses on home nursing, healthy cooking, and first aid, and presentations to large gatherings on health, temperance, social purity, and personal hygiene.
Knight kept careful records, and in her autobiography, Mississippi Girl (1952), she gave a statistical summary of her work since 1911: “I have held 9,388 meetings and have made 11,744 missionary visits. My work required the writing of 48,918 letters, and in getting to my appointments I have traveled 554,439 miles.”5
Throughout an era of severe oppression and segregation in American race relations, Knight challenged the status quo by enlisting in the gospel work and serving without fear both in the American South and across the globe in India. She died on June 3, 1972, at age 98 and is buried in the Newton Knight family cemetery in Jasper County, Mississippi.
1 The source for information in this article not otherwise specified is the author’s biography of Anna Knight: Dorothy Knight Marsh, From Cotton Fields to Mission Fields: The Anna Knight Story (self-published, Lulu, 2016).
2 Newton Knight’s story was dramatized in the 2016 film Free State of Jones. See Richard Grant, “The True Story of the ‘Free State of Jones,’ ” Smithsonian, March 2016, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-free-state-jones-180958111/, accessed July 3, 2018. See also Victoria E. Bynum, The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War (Chapel Hill, N.C., and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
3 Anna Knight, Mississippi Girl (Nashville: Southern Pub. Assn., 1952), pp. 27-31, 41.
4 Louis B. Reynolds, We Have Tomorrow: The Story of Seventh-day Adventists With an African Heritage (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Pub. Assn., 1984), p. 323.
5 Knight, Mississippi Girl, p. 223.