Nora Antonia Gordon was the first Spelman Seminary student to go to Africa. Her letters describing her experiences kept Africa alive in the minds of Spelman students who sang Give a thought to Africa, Neath the burning Sun. The song typified a spirit prevalent throughout the institution, that of the duty of African Americans to help Christianize and civilize their ancestral homeland. Nora Antonia Gordon was born to former slaves in Columbus, Georgia, on August 25, 1866. In 1882, she entered Spelman Seminary (now Spelman College) in Atlanta, Georgia, graduating in 1888. She attended a missionary training institute in London before arriving at the Palabala mission in the Congo Free State (now Democratic Republic of the Congo) in 1889. She was sent out by the Womans Baptist Foreign Missionary Society of the West (today American Baptist Churches in the U.S.A.). At Palabala, Gordon worked with Lulu Fleming. Gordon taught classes in the day and Sunday school. In a report, Gordon echoed a recurring theme of women missionaries: We very much need a girls house. If we can save the women and the girls and have intelligent Christian wives and mothers, the atmosphere of the community will be greatly changed. Gordon was transferred to the Lukunga mission station in 1891. There, she was in charge of the afternoon school and the printing office, where she set up type for printing the first arithmetic textbook in the local language. In 1893, Gordon took a furlough in the United States. Two years later, she married S. C. Gordon of Jamaica and the couple returned to the Congo under appointment by British Baptists. In 1900, she returned to the United States in poor health and died in Atlanta a year later, in January 1901, at the age of thirty-four.
Posted on: Mon, 25 Aug 2014 08:26:59 +0000
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