Translations:AY Honors/Adventist Pioneer Heritage/Answer Key/231/en
Charles M. Kinny was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1855, eleven years after the Disappointment of 1844. He was ten years old by the end of the Civil War. It was in Reno, Nevada, in 1878 at the age of 23 that Kinny attended a series of evangelistic sermons by J. N. Loughborough. Ellen White visited during the meetings and spoke to about four hundred listeners on the subject of the “Love of God.” Her message was well received and her presence added much to the interest of the people and “left a favorable impression upon the public mind.” Charles M. Kinny experienced conversion during those meetings. He never forgot Sister White’s sermon and joyfully embraced the love of God and accepted the truth about the Sabbath and the Second Advent. He kept his first Sabbath on the last Saturday of September, 1878, at the age of 23. He was one of the seven charter members and the only Black member of the Reno Seventh-day Adventist church. He was welcomed warmly by the church and was later appointed secretary of their tract society. Charles Kinny would become a prominent figure in early African American Adventism and most of what Adventists learned about the early progress of the work among African Americans they learned from the writings of Charles Kinny. Church leaders looked to him to develop the best methods of evangelism among African Americans. As such Charles M. Kinny was the first African American ordained minister in the Seventh-day Adventist church and is known as the The Father of Black Adventism.
