Historian Spotlights Francis Harper, First Black Woman to Have Poems Published

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a Baltimore native born in 1825, was a groundbreaking African American poet, abolitionist, and suffragist who became the first published Black woman writer in the United States. Despite being orphaned at age three and facing personal tragedies, she traveled extensively lecturing against slavery and advocating for women's rights and equality. Her controversial 1867 speech about race and gender in the suffrage movement led to her being marginalized from mainstream women's rights history, though she continued founding organizations like the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs.