very factors that defined the life of Frances Harper – education, charismatic and powerful speaking, successful activism, her many volumes of poetry about the consequences of racism and misogyny in the society, the four novels about social conditions and the ambition of independent talented women, and her essays about the politics of race and gender – all these accomplishments had to be reduced for future generations to the short story “The Two Offers” published in 1859, and the one major novel, Iola Leroy, published in 1892, if she was mentioned at all. Shorn of the context for an understanding of the sophistication of the politics that informed both pieces – though, again, but a small portion of her oeuvre – Frances Harper was described by academics and literary communities in the decades after her death as merely an early Black writer and sentimental poet of little consequence to the society. Generations would pass before her poetry and novels would be published again as significant artifacts of American literary and African American political history. Without the ability of African Americans to enter the academy as professors in increased numbers in the 1960s, it would never have happened. In a very real sense, our understanding of the life of this poet and activist, and of the development of our democratic polity in the last half of the nineteenth century, would not be possible without the continued work of Black academics today, a testament to the importance of Black lives to the understanding of how the United States continues to develop as a democratic society.
Frances Harper did not fit the model of the pathetic Black person in need of succor and charity from White benefactors, and she had not been a slave who escaped or was set free, aided by White people. She refused to countenance the social and legal walls being built around the idea of a distinction between the races that could be used to establish inequality for Black people. That some could succeed as exceptions to the expectation of a seemingly proven and innate Black inferiority to White people was, for Frances Harper, unacceptable. What we see in the novel Iola Leroy is an attempt to address this failure of conviction among Black people about their own right to political equality. Harper describes a vision of community development through the activity of her protagonist Iola Leroy, from the Civil War to the 1890s, that is an alternative to what has actually occurred. This is an offering, again, to her readers of a capacious vision of a racial equality to come – one that never arrived. Frances Harper was not just an incredible person, she was always also an incredible Black woman, and the possibility that she would symbolize and represent the Black community as its ideal for decades after her death in 1911 was, for many, an unacceptable concession to the idea of gender and racial equality.
We literally can’t trace the influence of Harper’s ideas in Black political culture and American organizational history, because these had to be repudiated and assigned for their origin to others. Problems of political vision that were not hers were readily attributed to her cause. In the same sense of a necessary rejection, her poetry and novels were denigrated as simply low culture, in contrast to the work published in high-culture magazines of the period, and described as too political, as protest poetry – as a vernacular, common voice lacking in sophistication. Others have disagreed, for generations, with the possibility that racial and gender injustice, and the description of Black life that her poetry and writing, her activism, represented, were topics worth exploring in their own right, instead of as a description of White largesse and sympathy (Peterson, 1995, p. 333).
The work of Frances Harper was also too radical – too convinced of the need to ask both Black and White, men and women, to answer the call of a mutual implication in the racial and gendered description of injustice in the society. Her work was simply too intersectional, too invasive of social norms that have prevailed in the society to this day, and that still require racial equality to be defined by gender inequality. The one covers the other, and around again, like a shell game where the idea is that there is nothing really there to begin with – no difference, no purpose beyond the perpetuation of the inequality itself.
It should be remembered, some 50 years after the first African American Studies program was established at a traditionally White university, that not just Frances Harper, but generations of writers, poets, and thinkers have had to be rediscovered for their importance to just this American democratic polity that we as Black people desire to create. But it really is the change in ambition for all of us with regard to race and gender equality that allows for the work of recovery that has occurred now across several generations of contemporary scholars. As Frances Harper’s poetry and fiction writing, lectures and essays are brought forward to our literary and political conscience, not only are we reminded of what has been lost by generations of a determined, brutal and inexorable racism, but also we begin to see the genius of a savant, a Black woman who gave her life to our cause. We begin to understand the call to conscience that she devoted her life’s work to discovering.
It has taken us so long to understand our contribution to the world in the midst of all that was endured in the long song of Black suffering after the Civil War – the lynchings, the chain gangs, the segregation to demean and reduce the ambitions of a community, the poverty and violence experienced as a people, the divisiveness and want that have been fostered to contain and exploit us all – everything that is still being done to Black people. The research made possible by the social organizations that established programs of study in African American Studies should be understood to be still doing the work that we need done, allowing us to consider the importance of those writers and poets, thinkers and public servants, who, together, might provide us with another country – another vision of how we can live together. Through her words, Frances Harper has offered us “a fairer hope, a brighter morn” (Graham, 1988, p. 199). We need to come to an understanding of what her poetry and writing are for us today, so that it can lead us to another shore, a different nation – one that Frances Harper envisioned in her work for racial and gender equality.
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