Phillis Wheatley / by an unidentified artist / Engraving on paper, 1773 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Poet Phillis Wheatley was brought to Boston, Massachusetts, on a slave ship in 1761, after having  been kidnapped at age seven or eight.  She was purchased by John Wheatley as a personal servant to his wife Susanna. As was the custom at the time, Phillis was given the last name of her master.  Her first name Phillis was derived from the ship that brought her to America, “the Phillis.”   She is believed to have been born in Senegal/Gambia around 1753. 

The Wheatleys educated Phillis and within sixteen months she could read the Bible and Latin and Greek classics.  She also studied astronomy and geography. In 1767, Wheatley wrote her first published poem at around age 13. The work, a story about two men who nearly drown at sea, was printed in the Newport Mercury.  Wheatley’s fame grew with the publication of other poems.

Her first and only volume, “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral”, was published in 1773, making her the first African American and one of the first women to publish a book of poetry in the colonies.  This volume was published as a result of patronage from Selina Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon, in England.  The Countess was a friend of Susanna Wheatley.  The volume included a preface signed by seventeen Boston men as proof of her authorship.  One of those men was John Hancock.  The financial support from the Countess of Huntingdon allowed her to go to London for the publication and promotion of her book and treatment for a health problem.

In the years immediately following her return from England Wheatley’s life changed drastically.  She was freed from slavery but the deaths of Susanna (d. 1774) and John (d. 1778) Wheatley were devastating to her.  Also in 1778 she married a free African American from Boston, John Peters.

Wheatley, strongly and publicly supported America’s fight for independence.  In 1775 she sent one of several poems she had written about him to George Washington, then the Commander of the Continental Army.  This prompted him to extend an invitation to Wheatley to visit him at his headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She accepted the invitation and visited him in March of 1776.

The marriage to Peters proved to be a constant struggle with poverty.  Wheatley gave birth to three children, all of whom died in infancy.  While Wheatley continued to write, she was unsuccessful in finding a publisher for her second volume of poetry.  Ultimately John Peters abandoned her and, unable to support herself with her writing, she was forced to work as a maid in a boarding house in squalid conditions.

Wheatley died in her early 30s in Boston, Massachusetts, on December 5, 1784, from complications of childbirth.  She died in poverty.

Burroughs was born May 2, 1879, in Orange County, Virginia, the daughter of John and Virginia “Jennie” Burroughs.  In 1883, her mother left her husband, taking Burroughs and her sister, and moved  to Washington, D.C.   Burroughs attended the M Street High School where she studied domestic science  and achieved high academic honors. During this period of her life she met Mary Church Terrell and Anna Julia Cooper, two prominent Negro women who became her role models.

 When she graduated, Burroughs attempted to attain a position as a teacher in the Washington school system but was denied the job.  She then moved to Philadelphia to work in the office of the Christian Banner while also working part-time for Rev. Lewis Jordin at the National Baptist Convention (NBC).  She later relocated to Louisville, Kentucky to become a secretary for the Foreign Mission Board of the NBC.  A speech she gave at the 1900 annual conference of the NBC, in which she argued for women’s increased involvement in the organization, led to the creation of the Woman’s Convention Auxiliary (WC).   Burroughs served as corresponding secretary until 1948.  She was then elected president and served in that capacity until her death in 1961.

In 1909 Burroughs founded the National Training School for Women and Girls.  It was the first school in the nation to provide vocational training for African-American females.  She was instrumental in persuading the National Baptist Convention to sponsor the institution and purchase the land for it.  Burroughs ran the school and it  was  managed entirely by African-Americans.   Many disagreed with the school curriculum that trained young women to become efficient wage earners as well as community activists. Burroughs also created her own history course to inform women about societal influences on Negroes in history.   The school was renamed in her honor in 1964.

A well-known, eloquent speaker and writer, Burroughs was active in the National Association of Colored Women, which helped found; the National Association of Wage Earners; and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History.  She toured the country denouncing segregation, employment discrimination and inequality.  A staunch feminist, Burroughs believed suffrage for women was the key to political power to end discrimination.   In spite of or perhaps because of her criticism of President Herbert Hoover’s silence on lynching, she was appointed in 1928 to chair a commission on housing for African Americans in conjunction with his White House Conference on Home Building.

Burroughs never married.  Instead she devoted her entire life to her work as a theologian, philosopher, activist, educator, intellectual and evangelist.  She defied societal restrictions on her race and gender and her work foreshadowed the women’s and civil rights movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s.

 She passed away of natural causes alone in her Washington home on May 20, 1961.

 

 

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911)

The list of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s accomplishments is lengthy. She was a suffragist, an abolitionist, a poet, a teacher, a prohibitionist, a public speaker, and a writer.

Mary Ellen Watkins was born free in 1825 in Baltimore, Maryland. She was the only child of free parents whose names are unknown. They both died in 1828, making Watkins an orphan at age three. She was raised by a maternal aunt and uncle, Henrietta and Rev. William J. Watkins Sr. who gave her their last name.

Rev. Watkins was the minister at the Sharp Street African Methodist Episcopal Church and in 1820 had established the Watkins Academy for Negro Youth. It was there that Frances received her education. A civil rights activist and abolitionist himself, Rev. Watkins was a major influence on his niece’s life and work.

At age thirteen, Watkins began working as a seamstress. She had been trained in the “trades” of sewing and domestic work in addition to academics at Watkins Academy. She also worked as a nursemaid for a white family who owned a bookstore. In her spare time she was able to read books from the shop and began doing her own writing. She published her first book, a collection of her poetry entitled “Forest Leaves”, when she was 21.

At age 26 Watkins moved from Baltimore to take a position as the first female teacher at Union Seminary, an AME-affiliated school for Black students near Columbus, Ohio. She taught domestic science there until it closed in 1853. The following year she took a position at a school in York, Pennsylvania. During this period of her life, she lived with the family of William Still, a clerk at The Pennsylvania Abolition Society and who helped refugee slaves on their passage along the Underground Railroad. Watkins began writing anti-slavery literature and, after joining the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1853, Watkins began her career as a public speaker and political activist. Her literary career by then was becoming quite successful. Her collection “Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects” (1864) became a commercial success, making her the most popular African American poet before Laurence Dunbar.

On November 22, 1860, Watkins married Fenton Harper and moved to a farm in Ohio. She remained there for the next four years, raising their daughter and Fenton’s three children from a previous marriage, until his death four years later. Fenton’s death left Watkins-Harper with a large debt requiring her to resume lecturing, teaching and writing in order to support herself and the children.

Because of her alliances with prominent women’s rights activists, she was a speaker at the National Woman’s Rights Convention in New York in 1866. There she gave her famous speech entitled “We Are All Bound Up Together”, urging attendees to include African American women in their fight for the right to vote. She emphasized that Black women faced a double battle against racism and sexism and therefore the fight for women’s suffrage must include suffrage for African Americans. The next day the Convention held a meeting to organize the American Equal Rights Association to work for suffrage for both African Americans and women. A dispute over support of the fifteenth amendment caused the organization to split. The amendment was to grant African American men the right to vote. Watkins-Harper supported the amendment. She, along with Frederick Douglass and other supporters, formed the African Woman Suffrage Association.

Watkins-Harper spent the rest of her career working for equal rights and education for African American Women. With Ida B. Wells, Harriet Tubman and several others she co-founded the National Association of Colored Women. Prior to forming the association, she published her most famous novel “Iola Leroy”. She served as the director of the National Association of Colored Youth and as superintendent of the Colored Sections of the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania Women’s Christian Temperance Unions.

Watkins-Harper died on February 22, 1911, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Library of Congress:

In this, BLACK HISTORY MONTH, you might put your time spent sequestered at home to good use and at the same time pay homage to the lives of American slaves by reading from the wealth of material available in the Library of Congress. This could be your opportunity to gain real knowledge and understanding of this part of American history you were never taught in any school. Below is an explanation of the collection from the Library of Congress website. You will be astounded at the wealth of information available. Good examples of what you will find are ROSA PARKS IN HER OWN WORDS and the “With Malice Toward None” inaugural speech of Abraham Lincoln.

From the Library of Congress:
Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938 contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) of the Works Progress Administration, later renamed Work Projects Administration (WPA). At the conclusion of the Slave Narrative project, a set of edited transcripts was assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves. In 2000-2001, with major support from the Citigroup Foundation, the Library digitized the narratives from the microfilm edition and scanned from the originals 500 photographs, including more than 200 that had never been microfilmed or made publicly available. This online collection is a joint presentation of the Manuscript and Prints and Photographs divisions of the Library of Congress.

The Volumes The published volumes containing edited slave narratives are arranged alphabetically by the state in which the interviews took place and thereunder by the surname of the informant. Administrative files for the project are bound at the beginning of Volume 1. These files detail the instructions and other information supplied to field workers as well as subjects of concern to state directors of the Federal Writers' Project.

Historical Overview In the Depression years between 1936 and 1938, the WPA Federal Writers' Project (FWP) sent out-of-work writers in seventeen states to interview ordinary people in order to write down their life stories. Initially, only four states involved in the project (Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia) focused on collecting the stories of people who had once been held in slavery. John A. Lomax, the National Advisor on Folklore and Folkways for the FWP (and the curator of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress), was extremely interested in the ex-slave material he received from these states. In 1937 he directed the remaining states involved in the project to carry out interviews with former slaves as well. Federal field workers were given instructions on what kinds of questions to ask their informants and how to capture their dialects, the result of which may sometimes be offensive to today's readers (see A Note on the Language of the Narratives). The field workers often visited the people they interviewed twice in order to gather as many recollections as possible. Sometimes they took photographs of informants and their houses. The interviewers then turned the narratives over to their state's FWP director for editing and eventual transfer to Washington, D.C. The administrative files accompanying the narratives detail the information supplied to field workers as well as subjects of concern to state directors of the FWP. For more information about the interviewers, the people interviewed, and the processes of collection and compilation, see Norman Yetman's essay which accompanies this online collection. In 1939, the FWP lost its funding, and the states were ordered to send whatever manuscripts they had collected to Washington. Once most of the materials had arrived at the Library of Congress, Benjamin A. Botkin, the folklore editor of the FWP who later became head of the Archive of Folk Culture at the Library of Congress, undertook the remaining editing and indexing of the narratives and selected the photographs for inclusion. As noted above, he organized the narratives by state, and then alphabetically by name of informant within each state, collecting them in 1941 into seventeen bound volumes in thirty-three parts under the title Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves (Washington, D.C., 1941). The multivolume set and other project files, including some earlier unbound annotated versions of the narratives, are housed in the Manuscript Division and described in the finding aid for the records of the WPA.

Other records relating to the ex-slave project are among the FWP files at the National Archives and Records Administration (Record Group 69.5.5) and are described in the Guide to Federal Records in the National Archives of the United States, Vol. I. (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1995). Volumes 2-17 of The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, edited by George P. Rawick and others (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972-79), present these narratives with a slightly different organization; the later volumes of Rawick's series also include ex-slave interviews housed in other archives. Anthologies containing selections from the Library of Congress collection include the Federal Writers' Project's Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery, edited by B. A. Botkin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945) and Voices from Slavery (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), edited by Norman R. Yetman, author of An Introduction to the WPA Slave Narratives under the Articles and Essays tab. For additional works using these narratives as well as other slave narratives, please see the list of Related Resources.

• About this Collection • Related Resources • Rights and Access

Expert Resources

• Finding Aid - United States Work Projects Administration Records • Manuscript Reading Room • Ask a Manuscript Librarian • Prints & Photographs Reading Room • Prints & Photographs Online Catalog • Ask a Prints & Photographs Librarian • Blog: Picture This • Collections with Photos • Collections with Manuscripts

Today we celebrate Dr. Justina Ford. Not only was she a true pioneer and trailblazer who made history by overcoming the barriers of race and gender to become the first African American woman to practice medicine in Colorado. She was compassionate, fair, equitable, fearless, and determined to help others. Her drive and determination made her an inspiration to others and continues to inspire us all today.

During her 50-year career at her home in Five Points, she delivered 7,000 babies and provided healthcare for Denver’s financially challenged immigrant communities. We were honored to name one of our state data systems for COVID-19 tracking “Dr. Justina” in honor of her legacy (more about that here: https://cdphe.colorado.gov/dr-justina) Dr. Ford’s impact on our community will never be forgotten.

Jarad Polis Governor of Colorado