People

Aimee Kennedy Semple McPherson was an evangelist, radio broadcaster, and public speaker. She innovated new ways to deliver religious messages through mass media.

Abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Maria W. Stewart was one of the first women of any race to speak in public in the United States. She was also the first Black American woman to write and publish a political manifesto. Her calls for Black people to resist slavery, oppression, and exploitation were radical and influential.

By the mid-1880s, Shaw was establishing herself as an advocate for temperance, a cause she took in part because of her time doing medical work in Boston. She first worked as a paid lecturer with the Massachusetts Women Suffrage Association, a position she secured through her connections with the prominent suffragist Lucy Stone. Moving up the ranks, Shaw was subsequently hired to work with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, or WCTU, a national organization.

Cathay Williams became the first African American woman to enlist in the U.S. Army; she posed as a man, enlisting under the pseudonym William Cathay.

John and Delores Moaney played an indispensable role in the lives of Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower. Explore the story of how the Moaney family became intertwined with the Eisenhowers here.

In the spring of 1878, Daniel and Willianna Hickman and about 150 other formerly enslaved people left Georgetown, Kentucky. They traveled by train to Ellis, Kansas and then on foot to Nicodemus. Attracted by the allure of what was predicted to be the “largest Colored Community in America”, the Hickmans and others saw homesteading on the frontier of Kansas as a new beginning. As a Baptist pastor, Daniel was leadership figure in the Black community of Nicodemus.

Biography of Roger Williams for the shared content people page

Robert Thomas Hickman was born an enslaved man near Boone, Missouri in 1831. With permission of his enslaver, Hickman learned to read and write. This allowed him to preach to fellow enslaved people on several plantations, and ultimately leading group of Black men and women to freedom in 1863 via the Mississippi River.

Jacob Stroyer was one of hundreds of enslaved African American laborers to work at Fort Sumter during the Siege of Charleston. Witnessing the deaths of other enslaved laborers and wounded himself by Union artillery fire, Stroyer survived the Civil War and received an education. Moving to Massachusetts in 1870, he later wrote and published his memoir and preached at an African Methodist Episcopal Church.

A renowned orator and religious figure for the A.M.E. Zion Church, Eliza Gardner advocated for expanding the rights of women and African Americans through her work in the anti-slavery, women's rights, and civil rights movements.