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Called By God
tion to serve as a delegate to the General Conference Session to be held in Battle Creek.
He was gratified that a former student had accepted his challenge to organize selfsupporting missionary work and thought that she could articulately represent the selfsupporting and medical missionary work of Battle Creek graduates.
At the age of 27 the country girl from Mississippi could give a good report at the
General Conference Session from her slightly more than two years of missionary work.
She had established a school of 24 pupils and built a comfortable, neat schoolhouse free of
debt, was conducting two Sunday schools, had given scores of lectures on health and
temperance, and regularly provided simple treatment for the sick. When praised
concerning these impressive achievements, she humbly responded, “To God be the glory.”
While attending General Conference, Miss Knight overheard some nurses discussing
the critical need for people of their profession in India. Anna recalled that years earlier
she had felt a sense of call to help the women of India. After seeking God’s direction,
she offered that if the General Conference would send a husband and wife team to
continue the work she had initiated in Mississippi—she considered the work to be too
heavy for one person—she would serve in India.
One of Anna’s good friends, Mrs. Atwood, and her husband agreed to operate the school
in Mississippi; and soon Miss Knight was one of seven missionaries bound for India.
Her first assignment was at the Karmatar Training School. She taught Bible and
English, kept the mission accounts, upon occasion lanced boils and extracted teeth, and
supervised the garden. And she was making history, for Anna Knight was the first black
woman missionary sent to India from America. (From H. D. Singleton, “Vanguard of
Torchbearers,” The North American Informant XXII. March-April, 1968: 1-2.)
Her greatest challenge at Karmatar was neither academic nor medical, but concerned
management of the garden. Though agriculture was a subject about which Anna Knight
knew a great deal, when she tried to show her helpers how to prepare the soil for
planting, they balked. They claimed it couldn’t be done that way in India—after all, they
were experienced, too.
One important project was the plantin g of sweet potato slips. From her background of
farming in the South, Anna knew that sweet potatoes would not grow in the hard
ground at the mission. Therefore she led workers to the river, supplied with gunny
sacks and the bullock cart; they brought back sand for the garden. In addition to the
sand, she instructed them to add barnyard manure to the soil. After they had mixed
these components together with a mattock, the workers were asked to dig a trench. Up
to this point Miss Knight had been able to enlist the villagers assigned to her to participate in this arduous work, although with an undercurrent of opposition.
However, when the garden director remembered having seen an American turnplow
in the barn and told a laborer to fetch it, the workers protested openly.
“Might be all right in America, no good in India,” one villager insisted. Thereupon
Miss Knight had the plow brought to her and, drawing on her Mississippi years, she

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