[Anna Knight was the daughter of Newton Knight, who deserted the Confederate army during the American Civil War, returning to his home of Jones County, Mississippi, and ignited a rebellion that fought against Confederacy for the remainder of the war.]
Despite this, one member of the Knight family chose to come back to the farm instead of leaving it. Anna Knight had grown into a forceful, bell-voiced young missionary who felt called to improve her Mississippi hill country people. She had spent six years training as a nurse, teacher, and missionary in Seventh-Day Adventist boarding schools in Chattanooga and Little Creek, Michigan, and she had a tough mind and unbreakable will. In 1898 she built her private school for black children, a project that excited the hostility of local whites, as did her preaching against moonshiners.
The school began as a dilapidated old cabin on one of her uncles’ farms. After a year, with profit from four acres of cotton she planted herself and the broadax labor of Knight men like Newton and Jeff, she was able to build a new schoolhouse of plank wood with glass windows. She taught twenty-four pupils at eight grade levels and charged them one dollar a month. Even so, only one parent could afford to pay in cash, the rest worked it off.
Anna taught adults as well as children, holding tutorials in penmanship, reading, and arithmetic, as well as hygiene, nutrition, and temperance. She taught women how to can fruit and on a biological chart showed them what liquor did to their kidneys. Soon local moonshiners sent her a message to quit preaching or “they would put me out of business.” Anna, who was nothing if not a Knight, sent back word that “I covered the ground I stood on, and when they got ready to shoot, I was ready.” Her family and friends urged her to shut the school down, but she replied that she was not “a quitter.”
Anna began traveling armed with both revolver and shotgun, which she kept close by even in her classroom. On one occasion after teaching a Sunday school class, she had to race on horseback through a gauntlet of white men who stood in the road and fired their guns in the air. Soon afterward, three glaring men entered her schoolhouse while she was teaching and took seats on the back bench. They listened to her lesson for several minutes, boring holes into her with their eyes. One of them deliberately spat on the floor. Then they stood up and left, walking into the woods. Certain that they meant trouble, Anna dismissed the class and summoned two of her male relatives. When the three angry whites returned, they were drunk, and a pitched fight resulted. “They soon found that the two ‘Knights’ were too much for the three of them, and finally gave up and left,” Anna wrote.
After that incident, various Knight males stood watch over the school building every night, while Anna “took my books and guns each day and carried on the work.”
Source:
Jenkins, Sally, and John Stauffer. “The Family Tree.” The State of Jones: The Small Southern County That Seceded from the Confederacy. Anchor Books, 2010. 299-301. Print.
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