Every day this month, the Center for Black Educator Development, in partnership with Education Post and Philly’s 7th Ward, will highlight a Black Educator Hall of Famer.
But, don’t forget, e’ry month is Black History Month and February is just the Blackest. All year are ongoing opportunities to learn and teach and the colossal impact Black educators have had on society.
Today, our featured Black educator is Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was born on September 24, 1825, in Baltimore, MD. She was born free, but she still experienced loss. Her parents died at the age of three. After their passing, she was taken in by family; and raised by her aunt and uncle after her parents’ death. Her uncle, William Watkins was an abolitionist, practiced self-taught medicine, organized a Black literary society, and established a school in 1820 called the Watkins Academy for Negro Youth. Harper was educated there.
While there, she engaged in rigorous lessons on Classical and Modern languages, the Bible, geography, philosophy, mathematics, music, and rhetoric. When they reached 13, the Watkins children were expected to earn a living; Harper left school to work as a seamstress and nursemaid for a white Baltimore family that owned a bookshop. That bookshop provided Harper with the opportunity to keep learning. Thus, her intellectual growth continued from reading and writing poetry.
In 1845, when she was about 20, she published her first book of poetry, “Forest Leaves.” She received support with the publication from William Lloyd Garrison and William Still. With her new connections to an abolitionist and member of the Underground Railroad, harper began lecturing against enslavement. She sent any earned monies to support the underground railroad work of her uncle back home.
Years later, in 1850, Harper moved to Ohio and began teaching at Wilberforce University; then the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s Union Seminary. She was the first Black woman instructor at the school. After a year, she took a teaching job at a school in York, Pa. Sadly (but not shockingly), her home state of Maryland passed a law stating that free Black people of the North were no longer allowed in the state and if they entered, they were subject to being resold into enslavement.
With that edict, Harper dedicated her life’s work to abolitionism, touring and speaking all over the country as well as Canada; speaking about the need for enslavement to be abolished. She was also local to the Delaware Valley. In 1857, the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society engaged her as a lecturer and agent for eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Although empowered by her activism, she still encountered racism. The New York Times details an instance:
During her travels, a conductor on a horse-drawn trolley tried to expel her to the platform of the car because of her race. In a letter to a friend that was published in 1858 in The Liberator, Harper recounted what happened next: “I did not move, but kept the same seat.” When she got up to leave, the conductor “refused my money and I threw it on the car floor and got out, after I had ridden as far as I wished.”
The racism didn’t stop there. Harper was such an extraordinary orator that some people refused to believe that she was a Black woman… Some onlookers insisted that she was a man dressed as a woman, while others believed that she was a white woman painted brown. Nevertheless, she persisted in the abolitionist movement and the movement for Black lives after the Civil War; standing up to white women of the suffrage movement, that she too was part of. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper died on February 22, 1911, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper; a member of the Black Educator Hall of Fame. For more information on Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, visit the following site.
