Mary Weston Fordham

Mary Weston Fordham was born c. 1843. She was an African American poet and the author of Magnolia Leaves (Tuskegee Institute, 1897), her sole collection. Weston Fordham ran her own school during the Civil War and worked as a teacher for the American Missionary Association, an abolitionist group that later founded nine historically Black colleges and universities. She died in 1905.