A poet, up from slavery

And mothers stood, with streaming eyes,

And saw their dearest children sold;

Unheeded rose their bitter cries,

While tyrants bartered them for gold.

And so began "The Slave Auction," a poem by one of America's first female African American writers: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911).

Unlike the children in the stanza, Harper was born in Baltimore to free parents. Following the sudden death of her mother, Harper was raised and educated by her uncle, William Watkins, a founder and teacher at a Baltimore school for free black children.

Harper's formal education ended at 14, but she continued to read widely. While working as a housekeeper and seamstress in the home of a bookstore owner, Harper absorbed poetry and prose during her off hours. As she had since childhood, Harper expressed her thoughts and feelings in essays and poems.

She left Baltimore in 1850 for a series of brief teaching stints in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Her political and social conscience sharpened following the passage of a Maryland law forbidding free blacks from entering the state without risking capture and sale into slavery.

With her return to Baltimore impossible, Harper channeled her abolitionist and spiritual beliefs into her writing. In 1854, she moved to New England and became more involved in the fight against slavery. Her first speech, "Education and the Elevation of the Colored Race," was so successful that the Maine Anti-Slavery Society hired Harper as a traveling lecturer.

Harper's writing soon began to explore the "intersections of all oppressions." Women's rights, temperance, and complete racial equality soon found their voice in her poetry and prose. A friend of Susan B. Anthony, Harper served as an executive member of the National Women's Christian Temperance Union and as vice president of the National Association of Colored Women.

"No race can afford to neglect the enlightenment of its mothers," she observed.

William Still, a prominent Underground Railroad conductor in Philadelphia, said of Harper's writing that "the effusions of her pen all savor of a highly moral and elevating tone."

In 1864, following the death of her husband, Harper and her daughter moved to Philadelphia. She made the city her permanent home in 1871 while continuing to lecture throughout the South. In her later years, Harper penned Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted, one of the first novels by an African American woman.

Harper died in 1911. She is buried alongside her daughter in Eden Cemetery in Collingdale.