as a free man. There is some dispute about the exact year of his birth. Census data indicates he was born in 1800, while his death certificate states that he was born in 1791. However, the timeline of his activism supports the evidence that Jennings was born in 1791, since it appears he had reached adulthood by 1810. Nothing is known about his parents or his early life, but by 1820 he had married an emancipated woman named Elizabeth (maiden name unknown, 1798–1873) and was making his living as a tailor. On 3 March 1821 Jennings became the first black man in the United States to hold a patent after he created an innovative dry cleaning process called dry scouring which earned him a substantial income His wife Elizabeth also was a committed abolitionist who played a central role in the formation of the ...
Verina Morton Jones was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and attended State Normal School in Columbia, South Carolina. From 1884 to 1888 she attended the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia—then widely acknowledged to be one of the best medical colleges for women in the country. She received her MD in 1888 and began practice in the African American community at Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Morton Jones was the first woman, black or white, to practice medicine in the state of Mississippi. She married twice; the first time in 1890 to W. A. Morton, MD, who died in 1895, and the second time in 1901 to Emory Jones, who died in 1927. She had one child from her first marriage, Franklin W., who was born in 1892.
Among the first African American women in the U S to receive a degree in ...
Susan Knoke Rishworth
physician, civil rights and women's suffrage activist, settlement worker, and clubwoman, was born Verina Harris in Ohio, one of five children of Charlotte (Kitty) Stanly, a schoolteacher, and the Reverend W. D. Harris, a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. Her mother came from a family of North Carolina free blacks who had inherited slaves that they wished to emancipate in the North before the impending Civil War. Around 1850 the family moved to Ohio, where Kitty Stanly and her husband taught school. The year of Verina Harris's birth is given as 1865 in some sources, but most probably it was between 1853 and 1857. Little is known about her early life, but the family apparently moved south to Columbia, South Carolina, in 1870 while her father was serving in an AME ministry in various locations in South Carolina More information ...