Harriet Jacobs Begins Writing Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Harriet Jacobs, who spent seven years hiding in a 9-by-3-foot attic crawlspace to escape her enslaver before reaching New York, began writing her autobiography around 1853. Published in 1861, it was the first autobiography by an enslaved Black woman in the US, unflinchingly addressing sexual exploitation no previous narrative had directly confronted.