Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

Born: 1825

Died: 1911

Country of Birth: USA

Nationality: USA

Ethnicity: Black

dropped out at age 13 to work

""As long as there are such cases as moral irresponsibility, mental imbecility; as long as Potiphar's wife stands in the world's pillory of shame, no man should be deprived of life or liberty without due process of law. A government which has power to tax a man in peace, and draft him in war, should have power to defend his life in the hour of peril. A government which can protect and defend its citizens from wrong and outrage and does not is vicious. A government which would do it and cannot is weak; and where human life is insecure through either weakness or viciousness in the administration of law, there must be a lack of justice, and where this is wanting nothing can make up the deficiency." (Wikipedia); "We are all bound up 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. You tried that in the case of the Negro...You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs. I, as a colored woman, have had in this country an education which has made me feel as if I were in the situation of Ishmael, my hand against every man, and every man's hand against me...While there exists this brutal element in society which tramples upon the feeble and treads down the weak, I tell you that if there is any class of people who need to be lifted out of their airy nothings and selfishness, it is the white women of America."(Wikipedia); "What would you do if you were in my place? Would you give up and go back and work at your trade (dress-making)? There are no people that need all the benefits resulting from a well-directed education more than we do. The condition of our people, the wants of our children, the welfare of our race demand the aid of every helping hand, the God-speed of every Christian heart. It is a work of time, a labor of patience, to become an effective school teacher; it should be a work of love in which they who engage should not abate heart or hope until it is done…I have written a lecture on education, and I am also writing a small book." (msa.maryland.gov); “This grand and glorious revolution which has commenced, will fail to reach its climax of success, until throughout the length and brea[d]th of the American Republic, the nation shall be so color-blind, as to know no man by the color of his skin or the curl of his hair. It will then have no privileged class, trampling upon outraging the unprivileged classes, but will be then one great privileged nation, whose privilege will be to produce the loftiest manhood and womanhood that humanity can attain.” (thestoryexchange.org); "

— Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

Field of Study: Civil Rights Activist, poet, author

Institution/Corporation: None found

Degrees & Memberships: Member: American Anti-Slavery Society (1853); Colored Section of the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania Women's Christian Temperance Union; National Association of Colored Women (1896); American Equal Rights Association (AERA); American Women’s Suffrage Association; Northern United States Temperance Union;

Awards: 2018 National Abolition Hall of Fame; Maryland Women's Hall of fame; Black Educator Hall of fame

Achievements: at age 67 published her widely read novel Iola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted (1892), placing her among the first Black women to publish a novel; wrote Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854) & it was a commercial success; her short story "Two Offers" was published in the Anglo-African in 1859, making literary history as the first short story published by a Black woman; 1896 helped found the National Association of Colored Women; her second book, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects was published 1854; 1858 she published her poem "Bury Me in a Free Land" in The Anti-Slavery Bugle, which became one of her best known works; 1859 Anglo-African Magazine published her essay "Our Greatest Want," in which she linked the common religious trope of oppression of African Americans to the oppression of the Hebrew people while enslaved in Egypt; published Sketches of Southern Life in 1872; from 1868 to 1888 had three novels serialized in a Christian magazine: Minnie's Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, and Trial and Triumph; 1854 began giving antislavery lectures; 1870 worked with the Freedmen's Bureau encouraging many freedmen in Mobile, Alabama, to "get land, everyone that can" so they could vote and act independently once Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment; 1883 to 1890 she helped organize events and programs for the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union; helped found the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA); 1896 helping found the National Association for Colored Women (NACW); her second small volume of poetry called Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects with an introduction by abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was completed in 1854; developed Sunday schools and YMCAs in the black community, as well as helping to rehabilitate juvenile delinquents and working for the security of the aged;