Nina Reid-Maroney will guest lecture at Chatham-Kent Public Library branches during Ontario Public Library Week Oct. 21-26 about her recent work, The Reverend Jennie Johnson and African Canadian History 1868-1967.
Jennie Johnson, after her conversion at a Baptist revival at 16, followed the call to preach. Raised in an African Canadian abolitionist community in Ontario, she immigrated to the U.S. to attend the African Methodist Episcopal Seminary at Wilberforce University. In Oct.1909 she stood before a group of Free Will Baptist preachers in the small town of Goblesville, Mich., 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 border.
In this first extended study of Jennie Johnson’s fascinating life, Reid-Maroney reconstructs Johnson’s 100-year story — from her upbringing in a black abolitionist settlement in 19th-Century Canada to her work as an activist and Christian minister in the modern civil rights movement. This critical biography of a figure who outstripped the racial and religious barriers of her time offers a unique and powerful view of the struggle for freedom in North America.
Reid-Maroney will be speaking at the following locations:
Dresden: Oct. 22, 7 p.m.
Chatham: Oct. 23, 7 p.m.
Ridgetown: Oct. 24, 7 p.m.
Reid-Maroney is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Huron University College at Western and a co-editor of “The Promised Land: History and Historiography of Black Experience in Chatham-Kent’s Settlements.”
