1825-1911
Antislavery Orator-Poet-Novelist

"Could we trace the record of every human heart, the aspirations of every immortal soul, perhaps we would find no man so imbruted and degraded that we could not trace the word liberty either written in living characters upon the soul or hidden away in some nook or corner of the heart."

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was born free in the slave city of Baltimore, Maryland on September 24,1825. She never experienced the fetters of slavery and yet she would devote her entire life to the abolitionist movement, and what she called "a brighter coming day". Writing more than a dozen books, essays, innumerable poems and stories, Harper would become the nineteenth century's most prolific novelist and its leading African American poet. Determined to make a difference in the world in which she lived, she became one of the most recognized and noted antislavery lecturers, a founder of the American Woman Suffrage Association, a member of the national board of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and executive officer of the Universal Peace Union, and one of the founding members of the National Association of Colored Women.