Zilpha elaw biography of martin luther king

Zilpha Elaw was born in 1790 to free black parents in Pennsylvania. One of twenty-two children, she was raised in a strong Christian home until age twelve, when her mother unexpectedly passed away and young Zilpha was sent to live with Pierson and Rebecca Mitchell, a Quaker couple who became her adoptive parents.

Amidst this instability, she embraced the Methodist tradition and became a member of the church as a teenager.

At twenty, Zilpha married Joseph Elaw, who worked as a fuller (a trade that softened raw cloth using urine) in Burlington, New Jersey.

Zilpha elaw biography of martin luther king day 2025

The couple’s only daughter, Rebecca, was born a few years before Zilpha suffered the loss of Hannah, her older sister. It was Hannah’s deathbed premonition of her sister preaching that encouraged Zilpha Elaw to preach her first sermon at a camp meeting in 1819.

She hid this calling from Joseph for a time.

Things changed in 1823 when Joseph Elaw succumbed to illness, leaving behind an eleven-year-old Rebecca and her mother, who fel