Lucy Stanton Day Sessions (October 16, 1831 – February 18, 1910) was an American abolitionist and feminist[1] figure, notable for being the first African-American woman to complete a four-year course of a study at a college or university.

[4] When her biological father Samuel, a barber, died when she was only 18 months old, Stanton's mother married John Brown,[5] an abolitionist famous around Cleveland, Ohio, for his participation in the Underground Railroad.

[8] This speech, in response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 which was about to take effect, urged the audience, particularly women, to put themselves in the place of the enslaved, to join the abolitionist cause, and to ultimately end slavery in the United States.

Stanton worked as a librarian and assisted her husband as editor for the first of Cleveland's African-American newspapers, The Aliened American.

In the first issue dated, April 9, 1853, Stanton became the first African-American woman to publish a work of fiction entitled "Charles and Clara Hays.

In 1864, correspondence between two supporters of Stanton would indicate that she was denied acceptance into a missionary program aimed to help freed African Americans in the south because of her status as an independent parent.

[1] After this debacle, she ended up joining a different group for the same type of work at the Cleveland Freedmen's Aid Society.