Day 23 – Maria Fearing

This devotional is part of the Black Missionary Heroes Past and Present Series.

Maria Fearing (1838–1937)

Missionary to Central Africa

Read Psalm 27:1–4

Maria Fearing a Presbyterian missionary born into slavery in Alabama. She financed her own education at Talladega College and worked as a domestic servant and an educator for many years after Emancipation. At the age of fifty-six, she became a missionary in the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) at a time when that country was under the brutal control of Belgium’s King Leopold II. While in the Congo, she rescued and ran a home for girls and young women who had been kidnapped or sold into slavery, often bartering goods for their freedom.

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