Mary Morris Knibb
Jamaican teacher activist and politician
Mary Morris Knibb, MBE (28 February 1886 – 21 September 1964) was a Jamaican teacher, social reformer and philanthropist. She founded the Morris Knibb Preparatory School and donated a building which is used as the headquarters of the Moravian Church in Jamaica as well as land for construction of a community center. Morris Knibb was a women's rights activist and the first elected councilwomen in Jamaica. She was the first woman to vie for a seat in the House when Universal Suffrage was granted to all Jamaicans.
Early life
Mary Lenora Morris "Nora" was born on 28 February 1886 in Carmel, Westmoreland Parish, Jamaica. In 1893, Morris began teaching as an assistant teacher at the Moravian Day School, in the customary pupil-teacher system of recruitment. Throughout the Caribbean prior to the 1950s, the most promising primary students, began working as assistant teachers to offset the cost of their further education. In some cases, they became full teachers upon passing an examination and in others were sent after their pupil-teacher contractual period to normal schools for additional training. Morris, followed the latter path and attended the Shortwood Teachers' College. While attending the college, Morris became one of the founders of the Alumni Students' Association.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mary Morris Knibb” 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.