Edmiston, Althea Brown, 1874-1937

Althea Brown Edmiston (1874-1937), African American missionary to Africa, was the daughter of Robert and Molly Suggs Brown of Russelville, Alabama. In 1876 the family moved to Rolling Fork, Mississippi. In the fall of 1892, she left Mississippi to study at Fisk University for the next nine years. After graduating from Fisk, she applied to be a missionary in the American Presbyterian Congo Mission and left for Africa in August 1902. In the Congo, she was made mistress of the Maria Carey Home for Girls, a day school in Ibanche. She survived the destruction of the mission at Ibanche during the Bakuba uprisings in the Congo in 1904. Fleeing to Luebo, she met and later married Reverend Alonzo L. Edmiston on July 8, 1905. They had two children Sherman Lucius Edmiston (b. 1906) and Alonzo Leaucourt Edmiston (b. 1913). The Edmistons made their home at the newly rebuilt village of Ibanche.

In 1906 she returned to America because their child had become ill, her husband joined her a year later and they settled in Tuscaloosa, Alabama until 1911. After raising enough money, they returned to Africa, but left their son in America. He too became ill, so she took him to America and left both children with relatives so that she could return to her mission work. They came back to America in 1920 to raise money for the mission and returned to Africa in 1921, taking their children with them. Althea Brown Edmiston wrote the first dictionary of the Bakuba language. She died in 1937 in Africa of sleeping sickness and malaria.