Anna knight
Anna knightAnna Knight lived a long and prosperous life. During her lifetime, she accomplished many things and did a lot of great things for the church and her community. She was born in 1874 in Mississippi, but her family was originally from Georgia where her mother was born a slave. The white man who bought the family was named Knight, and he moved the family to Mississippi. Obviously, he also gave the family their name. When slavery was abolished in 1863, the Knights moved in with one of their former owner's younger sons who didn't believe in slavery. They worked for him until they were able to buy land for themselves. They were, for obvious reasons, very poor, but through working together, they were able to build a home and a farm on the land they had bought and make the land prosper.
Life in those days way very hard. When slavery ended, blacks were heavily discriminated against were not normally formally educated. This was also the case for Anna Knight. She did not go to school as a child, and was not taught to read or write. However, through playing with the young white children in her neighborhood, she was able to convince them to teach her to read and write. She learned to write by copying words in the sand. Like a good neighbor, Anna taught the children younger than her the things she had learned. In this way, she was teacher even as a young child.
Anna was introduced to the Adventist Church in a very unconventional way. Usually the case with new converts is that they have friends that bring them to church, or maybe even complete strangers that introduce them to their religion. Neither of these conventional ways was the case for Anna. It seems that doing things the unconventional way was the case for most of Anna's life. She was introduced to the Adventist message through a column in the newspaper. "The Cousins' Exchange" was a newspaper column that requested that people send nice reading material to each other. She sent something in, and was hooked up with two Seventh-Day Adventists. They corresponded with each other, and the Adventists sent her pertinent eschatological reading materials. Among the literature they sent her was The Signs of The Times, one of the most prominent Adventist literature being published at the time. One of the women, Miss Embree, kept the correspondence going, and eventually sent her Steps to Christ. Anna read the book, and was fascinated by it. She decided to be baptized.
Anna did attempt to attend school, but was denied the privilege because of her color. The matron of the school did have pity on her, however, and had Anna assist her with her work. She also taught Anna privately, and Anna learned lessons...
To view the complete essay, you be registered.