Zilpha elaw biography of barack obama
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“Night Flyer,” about Harriet Tubman, and “Nat Turner, Black Prophet” stress the importance of religion to their subjects and illustrate how history is being crafted right now.
Tubman is famous as the “Moses of her People” who piloted scores of family members, friends and neighbors across hundreds of treacherous miles as they escaped slavery. She is rightly celebrated as an antislavery icon, the epitome of American grit and courage. In biographies and children’s books, she towers as the heroine of the Underground Railroad, the informal network that self-emancipators used to flee the South. Traffickers lurked in the slave-owning South and border states, and the nominal free states were often little safer. But Northern states or, even better, Canada offered refuge. Tubman made an estimated 13 trips back to her Maryland Eastern Shore homeland to conduct some 70 people out of bondage. She did not accompany her friend John Brown to his raid on Harpers Ferry, Va., in , but during the Ci
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A Rhetorical History: Listening to Our Preaching Foremothers
Women have been preaching in the United States since before the states were united—indeed, since before there were states. Anne Hutchinson pastored a church in her home in in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. During the s, Sarah Townsend preached in Long Island, New York, at the New Light Baptist Church. Harriet Livermore received a calling to preach in and began a long, celebrated ministry—preaching four times to församling during the next two decades.
Zilpha Elaw preached from – throughout the South, despite the threat of enslavement she faced as a free African American. Similarly, Maria Stewart—also a free African American—preached abolitionist and women’s rights sermons during the s; her ministry predates the work of the white sisters Angelina and Sarah Grimké, who began preaching when they joined the abolitionist movement. Rebecca Jackson traveled as a free African American itinerant preacher during the s, and then in she
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Zilpha Elaw was born in to free black parents in Pennsylvania. One of twenty-two children, she was raised in a strong Christian home until age twelve, when her mother unexpectedly passed away and young Zilpha was sent to live with Pierson and Rebecca Mitchell, a Quaker couple who became her adoptive parents. Amidst this instability, she embraced the Methodist tradition and became a member of the church as a teenager.
At twenty, Zilpha married Joseph Elaw, who worked as a fuller (a trade that softened raw cloth using urine) in Burlington, New Jersey. The couple’s only daughter, Rebecca, was born a few years before Zilpha suffered the loss of Hannah, her older sister. It was Hannah’s deathbed premonition of her sister preaching that encouraged Zilpha Elaw to preach her first sermon at a camp meeting in She hid this calling from Joseph for a time.
Things changed in when Joseph Elaw succumbed to illness, leaving behind an eleven-year-old Rebecca and her mother, who felt the call to pr