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

Harriet Jacobs, who had spent seven years hiding in a 9-by-3-foot attic crawlspace to escape her enslaver in North Carolina before reaching New York, began writing her autobiography around 1853. Published in 1861 as 'Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,' it was the first autobiography by an enslaved Black woman published in the US, with unflinching accounts of sexual exploitation that no previous narrative had directly addressed.