Barnabas Root

Yahny attended the original Mendi Mission school in Mendiland, Sierra Leone, where he was educated by Mary McIntosh, an alumna of Knox College, in Galesburg, Illinois, which was founded in the Calvinist tradition.

Yahny was brought to the United States twice by alumni of the College, first in 1859, and then again in 1863, in the company of C. F. Winship, a missionary at the Mission, for a higher education at their alma mater.

[4] He was Knox's first "international" student and presumably its first Black male graduate, He went on to earn a Bachelor of Divinity at Chicago Theological Seminary in 1873.

Root was then employed by the American Missionary Association as a lay pastor for a Congregational Mission Church for freedmen in Alabama.

He was ordained on 8 November 1874 in the Broadway Tabernacle in New York City,[6] a church long associated with the anti-slavery movement and then still active in missions around the world, especially Africa.