Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
The NYT’s “Overlooked” column, “a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times” — has got to be one of the most interesting recurring features in a daily newspaper. (Just my 2c.) I’ve posted about different ones before, including Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (author of Dictee). This one, about the 19th-century Black poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, was published toward the beginning of February, Black History Month.
Harper is known (or “unknown,” as the case may be) as an abolitionist and suffragist, roles that required an ability to use and finesse language. (Btw, I really enjoyed the novel Leaving Coy’s Hill by Katherine A. Sherbrooke for imagined insight into the life of “influencer” Lucy Stone and the era in general.) Whereas other suffragettes could perhaps more easily speak of women’s rights, Harper tasked herself with speaking to how Black women might fit in this “new era.” The piece shares this from Melba Joyce Boyd, a distinguished professor of African American studies at Wayne State University (and Harper’s biographer): “She wrote and spoke against the horrors of slavery and advocated for freedom for Black people, as well as women to be acknowledged as full citizens.” FYI, this is an example of what is meant by “intersectionality.”
In addition to “The Slave Auction,” one of her most famous poems, Harper is known as the author of the short story “The Two Offers,” which was published in The Anglo-American and “widely considered to be the first published short story by a Black woman.” Harper was an extraordinarily popular speaker on the circuit.
Within Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Wikipedia entry, I read this: “There is little scholarship detailing Frances Harper's involvement in the Women's Suffrage Movement. Indeed, Harper does not appear in the History of Woman Suffrage anthology written by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton...”
(As an aside, we could stand to be reminded that a school curriculum can’t — or won’t — teach everything. University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s Center for History Education has a lesson plan on Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, available online.)
originally published on instagram