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 High Plains Chautauqua |
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Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, America’s fearless champion of human rights, garnered national acclaim as an outstanding lecturer, writer, and activist. Today, few Americans know her name. Early in the nineteenth century, many Southerners condemned slavery as a moral evil. With the passing of the Compromise of 1850, the majority had stopped apologizing for slavery and now used the Bible to justify its existence. It was clear to all involved in the antislavery movement that slavery was not declining, and slave owners were attempting to expand it into new territories. Voices of protest were heard around the country; it was a time to challenge old beliefs, old lies and what Harper called “the abomination of the nineteenth century,” the Fugitive Slave Law. Harper was born free in the slave state of Maryland in 1825. Though never personally experiencing the fetters of slavery, she refused to divorce herself from those suffering under oppression. Hired by the Maine Anti-Slavery Society in 1854, Harper began a career spanning forty years. Faced with tremendous obstacles, she remained a relentless voice of reason, speaking passionately in hopes of bringing about a “better and brighter day.” Harper was a complex and confounding figure. William Wells Brown, a leading black writer and antislavery lecturer, characterized her writings as “Chaste language, with much thought, and a soul-stirring ring.” Often described as “ladylike,” with a “slender, graceful” form and a “soft musical voice,” Harper was also “a woman of strong personality,” and there was nothing demure about her politics. Harper’s brand of abolitionism, steeped in Christian morality, was of the same radical persuasion as William Still, Henry Highland Garnet, and Brown. With the end of the Civil War, Harper boldly traveled the nation, speaking to white and black alike to arouse the collective conscience. She was especially concerned about the future of women, and was frequently the only representative of color in the leading women’s organizations: the American Woman Suffrage Association, the National Council of Women and the Women’s Temperance Union. At the time of her death in 1911, Frances Harper was the best known and best loved African American poet in America. She published ten books of poetry (many self-published), wrote the first known short-story by a black woman, and authored three serialized and one full-length novel, Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted. Frances E.W. Harper had her finger on the pulse of the nation, and her 1866 message, delivered at the Eleventh National Woman’s Rights Convention, is a beacon of light for us today: “We are all bound together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul.”
DOROTHY MAINS PRINCE Dorothy Mains Prince is the founder of Sojourns LLC, an enterprise designed to bring the lives of outstanding African American women to students and community organizations across the country. Prince holds B.A. and M.A. degrees from Emerson College and a M.A. from Teachers College, Columbia University in New York. For more than twenty years, she has been teaching, directing, and performing throughout the New England area. Prince began her study and performance of the women appearing in the African American Women of Distinction series as a Chautauqua scholar for the Tulsa Humanities Council in 1995. Included in the series are Phillis Wheatley, Frances E.W. Harper, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary McLeod Bethune, Zora Neale Hurston, and Gwendolyn Brooks. SIGNIFICANT POINTS ABOUT FRANCES E.W. HARPER “. . . According to the judgment of several able critics who have examined the manuscript, I think I may take the liberty to predict that it may rank as high, if not higher, than any production of the kind ever published in this country by a colored person.” - William Still, 1854 - Review of Harper’s Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects “She has a noble head, this bronze muse . . . . The woe of two hundred years sighed through her tones. Every glance of her sad eyes was a mournful remonstrance against injustice and wrong.”- William Still, quoting Grace Greenwood in The Underground Railroad, 1872 “. . . Mrs. Harper’s total output is the most valuable single poetic record we have of the mind and heart of a race whose fortunes shaped the tumultuous years of her career, 1860-1900.” - From Invisible Poets: African Americans of the Nineteenth Century by Joan R. Sherman (1974) “Frances E.W. Harper is one of the most eloquent women lecturers in the country . . . . She is one of the colored women of whom white women may be proud, and to whom the abolitionists can point and declare that a race which could show such women never ought to have been held in bondage.” - Daughters of America by Phebe A. Hanaford (1882)
RECOMMENDED READING Boyd, Melba J. Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E.W. Harper 1825-1911. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994. Foster, Frances, ed. A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances E.W. Harper Reader. Oxford University Press, 1990. Gidding, Paula. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 2001. Harper, Frances E.W. Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted. Oxford University Press, 1990.
FRANCES E.W. HARPER QUOTES
FRANCES E.W. HARPER TIMELINE 1825: Born in Baltimore, Maryland, on September 24 to free parents. Attends William Watkins Academy for Negro Youth until the age of 13. 1845: Her first volume of poetry is published: Forest Leaves, which is non-extant. 1850: Moves to Ohio and becomes the first female faculty member at the newly established Union Seminary, the precursor to Wilberforce University. 1853: Moves to Philadelphia in order to devote herself entirely to the abolitionist movement. Lives with William Still and works in the Underground Railroad. She frequents the local antislavery offices, learning the theory and practice of that organization. She publishes several poems and essays in Frederick Douglass’ newspaper, The Liberator, The Christian Recorder, and other periodicals. 1854: Travels to New England, lectures in New Bedford, Massachusetts. “Education and the Elevation of the Colored Race”; is hired by the Maine Anti-Slavery Society as a lecturer. She travels throughout New England, Southern Canada, Michigan and Ohio. Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects is published in Boston. 1857: Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects is published in Philadelphia with preface by William Lloyd Garrison. 1860: Marries Fenton Harper; buys a farm outside of Columbus, Ohio; has one child, a daughter, Mary. 1864: Fenton Harper dies; Frances Harper returns to the lecture circuit. She travels to every Southern state except Texas and Arkansas. 1869: Begins publishing serialized novels: Minnie’s Sacrifice (1869), Sowing and Reaping (1876-77), and Trial and Triumph (1888-89). 1870-1900: She was affiliated with and held office in the Association for the Advancement of Women (AAW), the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the Universal Peace Union, the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSAA), and the International Council of Women (ICW). 1871: She settles in Philadelphia and purchases a home at 1006 Bainbridge Street. 1892: Publishes the novel, Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted, second full length novel to be published by a black woman in the United States. 1896: Participates in the founding of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) and is elected vice president in 1897. 1911: On February 22 Frances E.W. Harper dies at the age of 85. Her funeral is held at the first Unitarian Church in Philadelphia, and she is buried in Eden Cemetery in an unmarked grave. 1976: Harper’s 1006 Bainbridge Street house is designated a historical site. |
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