i randomly chose a name to write my paper on and learned alot about a legend in Black history. Read if you like. i love writing. :) Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was a black woman 100 years before her time. She is thought to be the one of, if not the, first African-American in American history to be published. She led an influential life full of civil rights for all, including equality for all races, ages, and genders alike. She interacted with supreme political figures of the time such as John Brown and Susan B. Anthony. She wrote about women having more goals in life than to just be married in love. She was really a woman of the 21st century, being a widow, and a mother yet still managing a successful career during a war-torn era, and even teaching Sunday school. She wrote novels, magazine periodicals, short stories, and poetry, just to name a few types of works that can be found in her name. She earned the title Mother of African Journalism and held many different political chairs such as vice-president of the National Association of Colored Women till her death. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was born in 1825, in Baltimore Maryland to free blacks in a slave state. When she was four she went to live with her aunt and uncle due to her mother’s passing. Her uncle, William Watkins who founded the Academy for Negro Youth, taught his niece a classic education that included the Bible, along with Latin and Greek. He also taught her about abolitionism and what the world was really like creating an urge to change the way things were. She graduated early and left school looking for work. The only work she could find, despite her education, was that of a housekeeper and seamstress for a bookseller when she was only 13. She impressed them with her already growing abundance of writings that she had been keeping since she was a child. The store owner allowed her, even encouraged her, to read in her spare time. In 1845 when she was but 20 years old she received her first publications. She stayed till the Fugitive Slave Law went into effect in 1850, which caused her to move to the free state of Ohio. There she taught sewing at Union Seminary for a bit. She moved along to Pennsylvania shortly after and started her active abolitionist life, lecturing and spreading the word that slavery must end. In 1851 Watkins Harper worked with William Still helping black salves through the Underground Railroad from Pennsylvania to Canada. In 1854 she wrote of racism and the oppression of women. She used most of her wages to help free slaves. She also started lecturing during this year, on anti-slavery and continued lecturing through the America before the Civil War. She worked with John Brown in 1859 and supported his wife during his trial and execution. She also wrote this year the first short story to be published by an African American “The Two Offers”, about a woman who yearns to be fulfilled by romance and marriage instead of what life could ultimately provide. She was married in 1860, a mother in 1862 and a widow in 1864. She continued lecturing and writing and fighting for freedom and education for slaves and women alike. She fought for the Fifteenth Amendment even though it wouldn’t allow her to vote being a woman, but knowing that steps would have to be taken and decided to support the vote for Black men more than any woman. She continued to write till 1892 when her most famous novel “Iola Leroy” was published. For forty seven years Frances Ellen Watkins Harper fought, taught, lectured, and showed America everything she could about civil rights. She paved a way for many other abolitionists to follow her footsteps and became an integral part of our American black history. She passed away 2 years after her only daughter finding peace in 1911. She was popular in life and honored in death. Nine years after her passage women gained the right to vote.
Posted on: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 00:37:58 +0000
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