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Barakana, Gabriel  

Jeremy Rich

religious and educational leader, was born to a family of chiefs in the town of Rusengo in eastern Burundi. The names and occupations of his parents are not known. He attended primary school in Rusengo from 1927 to 1933 and completed his secondary education at the Mugera seminary from 1933 to 1939. Barakana then decided to complete his theological training to become a Roman Catholic priest. He underwent training at the seminary in Nyakibanda from 1939 to 1947 and was ordained on 25 July 1947. Soon afterward, he went to the Vatican to study for a doctorate in canon law, which he received in 1950. Barakana thus became the first Burundian to ever receive a doctorate. Barakana decided to join the Jesuit Catholic religious order and officially became a member of this order on 20 May 1953 at Djuma in the Democratic Republic of the Congo ...

Article

Fatima, al-Fihri  

Osire Glacier

, founder of the University of al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, Morocco, the oldest operating university in the world, was also known as “Fatima al-Fihriya” and oum al-banine the mother of the children The al Fihri family migrated from Qayrawan located in present day Tunisia to Fez at the beginning of the ninth century during the reign of the Idrisids the first independent Muslim dynasty to govern Morocco During this period there was a significant migration of people from Qayrawan to Fez As a result the population of Fez grew rapidly far outpacing the city s existing infrastructure This left many neighborhoods lacking mosques When Mohammed al Fihri an affluent businessman and member of the Qayrawan migrant community died he left a large fortune to his daughters Mariam and Fatima Both daughters were highly educated and therefore well aware of the community s need for public gathering places Thus they decided ...

Article

Gaines, Wesley John  

Laura Murphy

author, bishop, and educator, was born a slave in Wilkes County, Georgia, to parents whose names are unknown. He was owned by a man named Robert Toombs. The seventh of fourteen children, Gaines was a sickly child, but during his bouts of illness he secretly taught himself to read and studied diligently.

Gaines became a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church of the South in 1849 following in his father s footsteps After the Civil War he became a preacher in the church but his tenure there was short lived as he and numerous other black Americans left the branch of the Methodist Church that had condoned slavery His brother convinced him to move to the African Methodist Episcopal AME Church where he was quickly ordained as an elder In the 1880s Gaines became the second pastor of the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in ...

Article

Grey, Curtis  

David Michel

was born on 3 April 1934 in Morgan Forest, Jamaica. His mother was a member of the Church of God (COG), which had begun work in Jamaica in 1918. The COG is a predominantly white Pentecostal denomination based in Cleveland, Tennessee that welcomes women ministers as evangelists and practices faith healing. Saved in 1952, Grey was later baptized and became a member of the Aenon Town COG. He started to preach and got elected deacon at the same church.

In 1955 the COG organized its first two congregations in Wolverhampton and Birmingham, England. The following year Grey moved to Leeds and worked as a bus conductor. In 1958 he married his first wife, Phebe Joanna Betty, a teacher, with whom he had twelve children. In April 1959 Grey began prayer meetings in Leeds which the COG in England formally organized as a new congregation with Grey as ...

Article

Summers, Jane Roberta  

Lois Massengale Schultz

community activist, was born Jane Roberta Whatley in Hayneville, Lowndes County, Alabama, the eighth child and only girl of fifteen children born to Minerva Kendall Whatley and Calvin Whatley, a sharecropper and laborer. At an early age Jane worked to help support the family, and by the age of sixteen she was selling insurance for the Atlanta Mutual Benefit Association.

Summers's lifelong commitment to helping others was instilled at an early age by her parents, who had been born into slavery. A family story passed down through the generations had an enormous impact on young Jane. Relatives told how her father, Calvin, at the age of five carried water to his enslaved father, Simon, who had been beaten, tied to a tree, and left to die. Simon was subjected to this torturous punishment because he had protested the master's sexual abuse of his wife.

In 1922 ...