Frances E.W. Harper: Poet and Activist

"We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity" (Harper).

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911) was born in Baltimore, MD, a slave state at the time of her birth. Harper, like her parents, was free. Orphaned at the age of three, she went to live with her mother's sister and her husband, William Watkins, an early civil rights activist. It was alongside her uncle that Harper commenced her devotion to civil rights causes by aiding him as a conductor on the Underground Railroad--thus defying the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Watkins was a minister and ran a school for African American youth. There, young Frances received an "uncommonly thorough education...she showed promise in writing and elocution, a strong interest in radical politics and religion, and a special sense of responsibility and devotion to lofty ideals" (Gates, et al. 491).

By the age of twenty, Harper had published her first volume of poetry. Though she gained popularity and her creative work was widely read, she was mostly known for her civil rights activism and devotion to progressive causes, such as abolition and suffrage. She and her uncle were conductors on the Underground Railroad. Any early 'club' woman, Harper was a founding member of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), a forerunner to the NAACP, and was superintendent of the Christian Women's Temperance Union. By the time she moved to Philadelphia, she had become a full-time crusader for the antislavery movement. Much in demand as a speaker, Harper had at one time, thirty speaking engagements across twenty cities (491).

Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, published in 1854, was by far her most outstanding financial success, selling over ten thousand copies (Gates). When her husband passed ten years later, Harper returned to the lecture rounds to pay off debtors. Her lectures attracted "large and receptive audiences," and the company and admiration of her peers: Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, and other prominent names in both abolition and suffrage movements. However, the road of activism rarely runs smoothly, and Harper found dissension among many of her activist comrades: "The racism of her feminist colleagues and the sexism of some of her black brothers" caused a rift among progressive thinkers and lecturers of the day. Gates quotes Harper's famous refrain upon encountering such discord among her friends and colleagues: "We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity."