Person · 1825–1911
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
One of the most popular poets and lecturers of the 19th century — a free Black writer who fused abolition, women's rights, and uplift.
A pioneering figure of Black [[black-literature]] and reform.
Frances Harper published her first book of poetry as a teenager and became a sought-after antislavery lecturer in the 1850s. Her poems and her novel Iola Leroy (1892) reached huge audiences and made her one of the best-known Black writers of her century.
She helped found and lead organizations for both Black civil rights and women's suffrage, insisting the two causes could not be separated — a forerunner of what we now call intersectional thought.