Henrietta Cordelia Ray was a New York schoolteacher and one of the few black women poets in the genteel tradition who achieved a certain amount of local recognition in the nineteenth century. Ray was the youngest of five surviving children born to Charlotte Augusta Burrough, who was from Savannah, Georgia, and Charles Bennett Ray, a one-time blacksmith who became editor of the Colored American, the third black-owned newspaper in America. As a journalist, and later as a clergyman serving the Bethesda Congregational Church from 1845 to 1865, Ray's father was actively engaged in lecturing and fund-raising for the causes of abolition, temperance, suffrage, and education. He served the Underground Railroad in arranging the escape of slaves to the North. His work brought him in close contact with well-known leaders, and William Wells Brown observed his importance to the advancement of black causes in The Rising Son (1873): "In the multitude of...