Since her conversion to Christianity and baptism at sixteen, Jennie Johnson followed the call to preach. Raised in an African Canadian abolitionist community in Ontario, she immigrated to the United States to attend the African Methodist Episcopal Seminary at Wilberforce University. On an October evening in 1909 she stood before a group of Free Will Baptist preachers in the small town of Goblesville, Michigan, and was received into ordained ministry. She was the first ordained woman to serve in Canada, and spent her life building churches and working for racial justice on both sides of the national border. Jennie Johnson's life, spanning from Reconstruction to the modern civil rights movement, contributed to nearly one hundred years of black and women's history -- from the abolitionist movement and New World diaspora of the nineteenth century to the campaigns for racial justice and women's rights in the twentieth. In this first scholarly treatment of this fascinating and understudied figure, her story offers a unique view of the struggle for freedom in North America.
Nina Reid-Maroney is associate professor in the Department of History at Huron University College at Western (London, Ontario) and the coeditor of The Promised Land: History and Historiography of Black Experience in Chatham-Kent's Settlements