nna Knight was born in Mississippi in 1874. She was baptized into the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Graysville, Tennessee, in 1893. In 1894 she was given help to attend Mount Vernon Academy in Ohio. In 1898 she graduated from Battle Creek College as a nurse. She moved to Jasper County, Mississippi, as a pioneer teacher and started a self-supporting school for Negro children and adults.

Knight was influenced by Dr. John H. Kellogg at Battle Creek to serve as a missionary to India, the first Black Adventist to do so. In 1901 she went to Calcutta as a nurse.

Back in the United States, Knight organized the first YWCA for Negroes in Atlanta, Georgia. In the 1920s she established the National Colored Teachers' Association of Seventh-day Adventists. At the age of 98 she was serving as its president. She died in 1972.

Knight was known as "the heart and soul" of Adventist African-American primary and secondary education in the Southern states. Every year she visited each school in the territory at least twice. She gave encouragement and help to the teachers who, by and large, served in one-room schools. During her summer vacations Knight would spend six to eight weeks training teachers at Oakwood College. The Anna Knight Educational Building on the campus is named in her honor. Many Oakwood graduates attended elementary school in the Anna Knight School House, now used by the Education Department.

Knight received the Adventist Medallion of Merit Award from the General Conference Education Department.