Her employers, a Quaker family, gave her access to their library, encouraging her literary aspirations. The family attended the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church.Īt the age of 14, Frances found a job as a domestic. She received her education at her uncle's Academy for Negro Youth and absorbed many of his views on civil rights. Who would become an associate of Frederick Douglass. Her uncle was the abolitionist William Watkins, father of William J. When she was three years old her mother died, leaving her to be raised by her aunt and uncle. It existed in the mind of Deity when He hung the first world upon its orbit and gave it liberty to gather light from theįrances Ellen Watkins was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1825 to free parents. The law of liberty is the law of God, and is the antecedent to all human legislation. "Could we trace the record of every human heart, the aspirations of every immortal soul, perhaps we would find no man so imbruted and degraded that we could not trace the word liberty either written in living characters upon the soul or hidden away Iola Leroy, originally published in 1892, was republished in 1988, as Harper was "re-discovered" by civil rights and women's rights groups.įrances Watkins Harper's passion was liberty and equality, as attested to in this address to the New York Anti-Slavery Society in 1857: Her first volume of verse, Forest Leaves, published in 1845, was hugely popular. To feed the poor and guide those caught up in juvenile delinquency. She worked as well in her local community Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who worked in the women'sĪn eloquent writer and speaker, she used these talents to further the above causes, as well as that of the Christian Temperance Movement and the National Association of Colored Women (which she helped found). She was a contemporary of Frederick Douglass, John Brown, and Harriet Tubman, all who worked in the abolitionist cause, if not the Underground Railroad itself.
Her mother died when she was three years old and she was raised and educated by an aunt and uncle who instilled in her strong Christian ethics and a strong abolitionist consciousness. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (SeptemFebruary 22, 1911), born to free parents in Baltimore, Maryland, was an African-American abolitionist and poet.
0 kommentar(er)
