Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: Poet, Abolitionist, and Suffragist Extraordinaire

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was a force of eloquence and empathy, born free on September 24, 1825, in Baltimore, Maryland, to free Black parents. Orphaned at three, she was raised by her aunt and uncle, Henrietta and William Watkins, devout abolitionists who instilled in her a love for literature and justice. By 1845, Harper had become one of the first African American women published in the U.S., with her poetry appearing in anti-slavery newspapers. Her 1854 collection, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, was a bestseller, blending verse with calls for emancipation.Harper's path led her to Philadelphia in the 1850s, where she taught at the Union Seminary before embarking on a grueling lecture circuit for the Maine Anti-Slavery Society. Her oratory—fiery speeches like "The Elevation and Education of Our People"—rallied crowds against slavery, drawing parallels to biblical liberation. After the Civil War, she settled permanently in Philadelphia in 1871, channeling her energies into women's rights and temperance. As superintendent of the Colored Section of the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania Women's Christian Temperance Union starting in 1886, she empowered Black women to organize independently, viewing sobriety as a tool for moral and social uplift.A co-founder and vice president of the National Association of Colored Women in 1896, Harper also penned the era's first novel by a Black woman, Iola Leroy (1892), which explored Reconstruction through African American eyes. Until her death from heart failure on February 22, 1911, at age 85, Harper's home on Philadelphia's Christian Street was a hub for reformers. Her words endure: "We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity." In Philadelphia, she wove that bundle tighter.