Maria Fearing was born into slavery in Alabama in 1838. At the age of twenty-seven, shortly after the end of the Civil War, Maria Fearing was set free. She used the domestic skills she had learned while enslaved to earn a living. Soon, she had gone to school to learn how to read and had saved up enough money to buy her own home (notable for any woman of her time, let alone a black one).

Eventually, Maria met William Henry Sheppard, a black missionary who came to give an address about his harrowing adventures overseas. Maria was already fifty-six years old at this point in her life and was rejected by the mission board because of her advanced age. However, with the same determination that had led her to purchase her own home and learn to read after the age of thirty, Maria decided to finance her own journey. She sold her home and moved away from everything she knew, and on May 26, 1894, she arrived in New York to set sail for Africa. She spent her years in the Congo working on behalf of the children there.

Maria died in 1937, at the age of ninety-nine. She never married and never bore children, but was “Mama Wu Mptu” (or Mother From Far Away) to scores of Congolese children, and devoted her life to the service of others.