Print
Email
AT A GLANCE
Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins
6 articles on Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins
Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
Word Count: 1224 Includes: Bibliography(b. 24 September 1825; d. 22 February 1911), writer, orator, abolitionist, feminist, and social reformer. Harper was born in Baltimore to free black parents. Ironically, she was orphaned when she was three years old, similarly to many of the slave children whom she would write about in adulthood. Her uncle, the Reverend William Watkins, an orator and a teacher at a Baltimore high school he founded for African American youth, raised her until she entered domestic service at age thirteen. Like the enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley, she read books at the encouragement of her white employers, who owned a bookstore, and her writing talents blossomed. By the beginning of the Civil War she had published two volumes of poetry, Forest Leaves (1845) and Poems ...
Read full articleHarper, Frances Ellen Watkins
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 1270 Includes: Bibliography1825–1911
African American activist, lecturer, poet, and novelist dedicated to promoting social uplift—of women, of African Americans, and of African American women in particular. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was born into a free black family in Baltimore, Maryland. She was orphaned at the age of two, and then raised by her uncle, the Reverend William Watkins, director of Baltimore's prestigious Academy for Negro Youth. Harper attended the school, where she studied Greek, Latin, and the Bible. As a result, she was better educated than most other American women of her day, black or white. Harper began writing poetry as a teenager, publishing the poetry collection Forest Leavesbefore she was twenty. Her second career, as an activist, began almost a decade ...
Read full articleHarper, Frances Ellen Watkins
Source: African American National Biography
Word Count: 1636 Includes: Further Reading(24 Sept. 1825–20 Feb. 1911) poet, novelist, activist, and orator, was born Frances Ellen Watkins to free parents in Baltimore, Maryland. Her parents' names remain unknown. Orphaned by the age of three, Watkins is believed to have been raised by her uncle, the Reverend William Watkins, a leader in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and a contributor to such abolitionist newspapers as Freedom's Journal and the Liberator. Most important for Watkins, her uncle was also the founder of the William Watkins Academy for Negro Youth, where she studied. A well-known and highly regarded school, the academy offered a curriculum included elocution, composition, Bible study, mathematics, and history. The school also emphasized social responsibility and political leadership. Although Watkins withdrew from formal schooling at-the age of thirteen to begin work as a ...
Read full articleHarper, Frances Ellen Watkins
Source: Black Women in America, Second Edition
Word Count: 3402 Includes: Bibliography(b. 24 September 1825; d. 22 February 1911),
internationally recognized journalist and the nineteenth century's most prolific African American novelist and best-loved African American poet, known as the “bronze muse.” For sixty-eight years, Harper wrote, recited, and published poetry and fiction, essays, and letters, all designed to delight and to teach people how to live lives of high moral purpose and dedicated social service.But the publication of over a dozen books and innumerable poems, essays, and stories was only a part of her efforts to work for what she called “a brighter coming day.” Harper was an active member of the Underground Railroad, one of the first African American women to be hired as an abolitionist lecturer, a founder of the American Woman Suffrage Association, a member of ...
Read full articleHarper, Frances Ellen Watkins
Source: American National Biography Online
Word Count: 1201 Includes: Bibliographypolitical activist and author, was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the only child of free parents. She was orphaned at an early age and raised by an aunt. She attended a school for free blacks, which was run by her uncle, the Reverend William Watkins. Her formal education ended at age thirteen. Harper became a nursemaid and found additional employment as a seamstress, needlecraft teacher, and traveling abolitionist lecturer. She also lectured in support of woman suffrage. She later became a schoolteacher in Ohio and Pennsylvania. ...
Read full articleHarper, Frances Ellen Watkins
Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature
Word Count: 1674(1825–1911), novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, orator, and activist. Born free in the slave state of Maryland, Frances Ellen Watkins was orphaned at an early age. She attended the William Watkins Academy for Negro Youth in Baltimore, an institution noted for rigorous training in a classical curriculum of languages, biblica studies, and elocution, and for developing professiona and religious leaders of unusual personal integrity and political activity. Harper was an exemplary alumna. At age twenty-five, she moved to Columbus, Ohio, to become the first woman professor at the newly formed Union Seminary (later Wilberforce University). Exiled from Maryland by state laws that prohibited entry of free blacks into the state and frustrated by the increasing power of slaveholders, in ...
Read full article
