Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: Early African American Civil Rights Activist, Poet and Author

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (b. 9/24/1825 - d. 2/22/1911)

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was born as a free woman during a time of slavery in the United States of America. She was born to free African parents in Baltimore, Maryland on September 24, 1825.  In 1828, at the age of three, her mother died and she was sent to be raised by her maternal aunt who had married Rev. William Watkins. Rev. Watkins was a notable African Methodist Episcopal Church minister, a civil rights activist and an educator. Harper received her formal education at the family-operated Watkins Academy for Negro Youth.

After coming of age, Harper left the Watkins' residence to become a slavery abolitionist, women suffrage advocate, and writer attributed to a number of great acts. For example, in 1858, at the age of 33 -- and before the U.S. Civil War -- Ms. Harper refused to ride in the “colored” section of a segregated trolley car in Philadelphia. This was 100 years before Rosa Parks' great stand for justice in the USA.

Actively involved in the slavery abolishionist movement, Harper was a staunch advocate for equal rights for Africans in the young nation actively involved in trafficking of humans as slaves. She was a sought after orator and spoke on the equality of all races and genders, calling for increased temperance in civil society.




Photo of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper in her elder years.

Frances Harper's short story "The Two Offers", first published in June 1859, is historically notable as the first short story published by an American woman of any race or ethnicity. By 1892, Harper would publish Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted, which many literary commentators distinguish as the first novel written by an African-American woman.

A prolific poet, Harper published nine volumes of poetry all related to equal rights. Arguably her most famous poem is “Bury Me In A Free Land.” The story behind the poem is that it was written while Ms. Harper was traveling on a lecture tour in the late 1850s. At the time she wrote the poem, she was very ill and may have thought she was writing a last testament to her people. A literary masterpiece, the poem was first published in 1864.

BURY ME IN A FREE LAND

Make me a grave where'er you will,

In a lowly plain, or a lofty hill;

Make it among earth's humblest graves,

But not in a land where men are slaves.

I could not rest if around my grave

I heard the steps of a trembling slave;

His shadow above my silent tomb

Would make it a place of fearful gloom.

I could not rest if I heard the tread

Of a coffle gang to the shambles led,

And the mother's shriek of wild despair

Rise like a curse on the trembling air.

I could not sleep if I saw the lash

Drinking her blood at each fearful gash,

And I saw her babes torn from her breast,

Like trembling doves from their parent nest.

I'd shudder and start if I heard the bay

Of bloodhounds seizing their human prey,

And I heard the captive plead in vain

As they bound afresh his galling chain.

If I saw young girls from their mother's arms

Bartered and sold for their youthful charms,

My eye would flash with a mournful flame,

My death-paled cheek grow red with shame.

I would sleep, dear friends, where bloated might

Can rob no man of his dearest right;

My rest shall be calm in any grave

Where none can call his brother a slave.

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.

Margaret Walker: A Writer and Poet of the Black Chicago Renaissance

Margaret Walker (b. July 7, 1915 – d. November 30, 1998).

Margaret Walker was a poet and writer of African descent born in Birmingham, Alabama. The eldest of five children, her father was Sigismund C. Walker, a Methodist minister, linguist and professor. Her mother was Marion Dozier Walker, a musicologist and professor. In 1925, Walker's family moved to New Orleans, Louisiana. She underwent her early education in New Orleans, including two years of college at New Orleans University (now Dillard University). Encouraged by Langston Hughes, Walker moved to Chicago and attend Northwestern University. In 1934, she would earn her B.A. in English, with a focus on Romantic poets, at the age of 19 years. 

The home of Walker's first published poem was The Crisis magazine, published by W. E. B. Du Bois. By 1935, she was active in the South Side Writers’ Group of the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Her award-winning poem For My People was first published in 1937. Walker soon became part of the thriving Black Chicago Renaissance, a cultural arts movement among African Americans that began in the 1930s. Her most well-known work is her classic novel Jubilee, published in 1966.

For Walker, Chicago was a cultural boom city.  The Great Migration of African Americans from the South to Chicago's neighborhoods brought the hope of a people to the city. While not as well known as its sister renaissance in Harlem, the movement included such famous African American writers as Arna Bontemps, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, Margaret Walker and Richard Wright. Musicians active during the Black Chicago Renaissance were such luminaries as Louis Armstrong, Thomas A. Dorsey and Earl Hines. Live Jazz and Blues clubs, such as the Palm Tavern, were many in Chicago's predominantly African-American Bronzeville community.

For My People

by Margaret Walker
     

For my people everywhere singing their slave songs

     repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues

     and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an

     unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an

     unseen power;
 

For my people lending their strength to the years, to the

    gone years and the now years and the maybe years,

    washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending

    hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching

    dragging along never gaining never reaping never

    knowing and never understanding;

For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama

    backyards playing baptizing and preaching and doctor

    and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking

    and playhouse and concert and store and hair and

    Miss Choomby and company;

For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn

    to know the reasons why and the answers to and the

    people who and the places where and the days when, in

    memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we

    were black and poor and small and different and nobody

    cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood;

For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to

    be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing and

    play and drink their wine and religion and success, to

    marry their playmates and bear children and then die

    of consumption and anemia and lynching;

For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox

    Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New

    Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy

    people filling the cabarets and taverns and other

    people’s pockets and needing bread and shoes and milk and

    land and money and something—something all our own;

For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time

     being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when

     burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackled

     and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures

     who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;

For my people blundering and groping and floundering in

     the dark of churches and schools and clubs

     and societies, associations and councils and committees and

     conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and

     devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches,

     preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by

     false prophet and holy believer;

For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way

    from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding,

    trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people,

    all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations;

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a

    bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second

    generation full of courage issue forth; let a people

    loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of

    healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing

    in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs

    be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now

    rise and take control.