Фрэнсис Эллен Уоткинс Харпер: Аболиционист, ақын және жазушы өмірі

African American author and activist
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (September 24, 1825 – February 22, 1911) was an American abolitionist, suffragist, poet, temperance activist, teacher, public speaker, and writer. Beginning in 1845, she was one of the first African American women to be published in the United States. Born free in Baltimore, Maryland, Harper had a long and prolific career, publishing her first book of poetry at the age of 20. At 67, she published her widely praised novel Iola Leroy (1892), placing her among the first Black women to publish a novel. As a young woman in 1850, Harper taught domestic science at Union Seminary in Columbus, Ohio, a school affiliated with the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME). in Baltimore, Maryland (then a slave state), the only child of free parents. Her parents, whose names are unknown, both died in 1828, making Watkins an orphan at the age of three. Frances Watkins's uncle was the minister at the Sharp Street African Methodist Episcopal Church. Watkins was educated at the Watkins Academy for Negro Youth, which her uncle had established in 1820. At 13, Watkins became employed as a seamstress and nursemaid for a white family that owned a bookshop. The following year Watkins took a position at a school in York, Pennsylvania.

Harper's writing career started in 1839 when she published pieces in antislavery journals. Her politics and writing informed each other. Her writing career started 20 years before she was married, so several of her works were published under her maiden name of Watkins. Harper published her first volume of verse, Forest Leaves, or Autumn Leaves, in 1845 when she was 20 years old. This book marked her as an important abolitionist voice. A single copy of this volume, long lost, was rediscovered in the early 21st century by scholar Johanna Ortner in Baltimore, at the Maryland Historical Society in the 2010s. Her second book, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854), was extremely popular. Over the next few years, it was reprinted several times. (97 years before Rosa Parks). In the same year, she published her poem "Bury Me in a Free Land" in The Anti Slavery Bugle, which became one of her best known works. In 1859, Harper's story "The Two Offers" was published in The Anglo African Newspaper, making her the first Black woman to publish a short story. That same year, Anglo African Magazine published her essay "Our Greatest Want," in which Harper linked the common religious trope of oppression of African Americans to the oppression of the Hebrew people while enslaved in Egypt. Anglo African Magazine and the weekly Anglo African newspaper were both Civil War era periodicals that served as a forum for debate among abolitionists and scholars. Harper published 80 poems. In her poem "The Slave Mother", she writes: "He is not hers, although she bore / For him a mother's pains; / He is not hers, although her blood / Is coursing through his veins! / He is not hers, for cruel hands / May rudely tear apart / The only wreath of household love / That binds her breaking heart." Throughout the two stanzas, Harper demonstrates the restricted relationship between an enslaved mother and her child, while including themes of family, motherhood, humanity and slavery. Another of her poems, "To the Cleveland Union Savers," published in The Anti Slavery Bugle of Feb. 23, 1861, champions Sara Lucy Bagby, the last person in the United States to be returned to slavery under the Fugitive Slave Law. Harper published Sketches of Southern Life in 1872. This anthology detailed her experience touring the Southern United States and meeting newly freed Black people. In these poems she described the harsh living conditions faced by a Black woman during both slavery and the Reconstruction era. Harper uses the figure of a former slave, called Aunt Chloe, as a narrator in several of these sketches. From 1868 to 1888, Harper had three novels serialized in a Christian magazine: Minnie's Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, and Trial and Triumph.

When Harper began giving antislavery lectures, the first of which took place in 1854, her gender attracted attention. The challenges she faced were not limited to racial prejudices, for in those days black women who spoke publicly about racial issues were still few in number and scientific racism was deeply intertwined with scientific sexism. It was taken by some as confirmation of gendered stereotypes about the differences between black women and white women, as in the scientific thinking of the day black women were cast as a Jezebel type, "governed almost entirely by her libido," drawing a stark contrast with the 19th century ideal of sexually pure white femininity. In 1853, Watkins joined the American Anti Slavery Society and became a traveling lecturer for the group. She delivered many speeches during this time and faced much prejudice and discrimination along the way. In 1854, Watkins delivered her first anti slavery speech called "The Elevation and Education of Our People." She continued to travel, lecturing throughout the East, the Midwest, and Canada from 1856 to 1860. In her role as superintendent of the Colored Section of the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania WCTU, Harper facilitated both access and independent organizing for Black women, promoting the collective action of all women as a matter of both justice and morality. "Activists like Harper and Frances Willard campaigned not only for racial and sexual equality but also for a new understanding of the federal government's responsibility to protect rights, regulate morality, and promote social welfare".

Numerous African American women's service clubs are named in her honor. Across the nation, in cities such as St. Louis, St. Paul, and Pittsburgh, F. E. W. Harper Leagues and Frances E. Harper Women's Christian Temperance Unions thrived well into the twentieth century. A historical marker was installed to commemorate her by her home at 1006 Bainbridge Street, Philadelphia. (See marker at left side of photo above.) A honors dormitory was named for her and Harriet Tubman at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland; it is commonly referred to as Harper Tubman, or simply Harper. An excerpt from her poem "Bury Me in a Free Land" is inscribed on a wall of the Contemplative Court, a space for reflection in the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. The excerpt reads: "I ask no monument, proud and high to arrest the gaze of the passers by; all that my yearning spirit craves is bury me not in a land of slaves." Her poem "Bury Me in a Free Land" was recited in Ava DuVernay's film August 28: A Day in the Life of a People, which debuted at the 2016 opening of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. In 2018 Harper was inducted to the National Abolition Hall of Fame in Peterboro, New York.