February 16, 2021 - Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

On February 16, 2021, Lyles Station Historic School and Museum recognizes the contributions of poet, fiction writer, journalist, abolitionist, and suffragette Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.
Born in 1825, during a time when women were discouraged from voicing political opinions and most African Americans were slaves, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s name was recognized during her life as a prominent abolitionist speaker second only to Frederick Douglass, well-known for her speaking tours discussing slavery, civil rights and women’s suffrage. Frances assisted slaves escaping through the Underground Railroad and her many anti-slavery articles published in newspapers, earned her the reputation as the mother of African American journalism.
A recognized author, she donated most of the profits from the sale of her books to promote the work of the Underground Railroad.
Frances was born in Baltimore to free parents and grew up free, raised by her uncle after her mother died and attending the school he ran, the Academy for Negro Youth, until she turned thirteen and went to work as a domestic in a Quaker household. There she enjoyed access to a wide range of reading material, and read she did, continuing her education on her own.
When she was twenty, she wrote and published a collection of her poetry and prose, titled Forest Leaves. A few years later, she could be found teaching sewing near Columbus, Ohio, and later teaching in Pennsylvania.
The 1850s saw a rise in tensions involving slavery, especially in border states, and Frances soon found herself involved in antislavery lectures. During this time, Frances lived in a home serving as a station for the Underground Railroad, ran by William Still, known as the father of the Underground Railroad, and his wife.
In 1854, Maryland, her home state passed a law stating that free African Americans could no longer enter Maryland. If they did and were found, they would be apprehended and sold into slavery. Frances could not return home and decided to devote all of her efforts to the antislavery cause.
Having never known slavery herself but aware of prejudice and discrimination, Frances was horrified by the stories told by the escaped slaves, making her all the more determined to speak out against slavery, and the Stills encouraged her in her work.
In Massachusetts, she presented her lecture entitled “Education and the Elevation of the Colored Race” in 1854.
Her success with this engagement propelled her on a two-year lecture tour for the Maine Anti-Slavery Society, and from there she travelled throughout the Eastern states and the Midwest. She often read to her audiences from her second book, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects in which she wrote about motherhood, separation, and death. Of course, she would recite her antislavery poem “Bury Me in a Free Land.”
A prolific writer, she was published in many periodicals and her short story “The Two Offers” published in the Anglo-African Magazine in 1859 is reputed to be the first story published by an African American author, much less a female African American.
Fenton Harper married Frances in 1860 but sadly died four years later, so she returned to the lecture circuit touring in the South as an activist for civil rights, women’s rights, and educational opportunities for everyone, along with being an outspoken leader of the temperance movement.
Recognized as a leader in the women’s suffrage movement, Frances believed that for it to succeed that both black and white women would have to work together and called out other suffrage leaders for their racism.
At the 1866 National Women's Rights Convention, she noted the lack of female solidarity across racial lines, declaring, “You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs.”
In her famous speech “We Are All Bound Up Together,” she urged white suffragettes to include African American women in their fight for suffrage, pointing out that African American women dealt with both sexism and racism.
1872 saw her publication of Sketches of Southern Life, poems told in black vernacular.
The 1880s saw her in charge of activities for African American youth for the national Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, later serving as the director of the American Association of Education of Colored Youth and organizing the National Association of Colored Women and serving as its elected vice-president in 1897.
These activities did not keep Frances from writing. She published several novels, essay collections, short stories, and collections of poetry.
Her 1892 novel Iola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted dealt with such serious social issues as mixed-race relationships, miscegenation, temperance, women’s education, and social responsibility.