Althea Brown Edmiston
Presbyterian missionary (1874-1937)
Althea Maria Brown Edmiston (December 17, 1874 – June 10, 1937) was an African-American teacher and Presbyterian missionary, working in the Belgian Congo for more than thirty years. She compiled the first dictionary and grammar for Bushong, the language of the Kuba Kingdom.
Early life
Althea Maria Brown was born in Russellville, Alabama, one of the ten children of Robert Brown and Mary Suggs Brown. Her parents were emancipated from slavery as young adults. She was raised on her father's farm near Rolling Fork, Mississippi. She attended Fisk University, beginning in 1892 and finishing her studies in 1901. She was the only woman speaker at the Fisk commencement in 1901. She underwent further training for mission work at the Chicago Training School for City and Foreign Missions.
Career
In her youth, Brown lived and worked as a nurse in the household of a white family for two years. While she was a college student, she earned money as a cook, as a hairdresser, and as a summer school teacher.
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This entry incorporates text from “Althea Brown Edmiston” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.