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True Colors Annual Conference XIX |
North East Digital VillageBlack Women AuthorsOctavia V. Rogers Albert: (1824-1890) Biographer of former slaves, educator, and community leader. Born December 24, 1853 in Oglethorpe, Georgia, she lived in slavery until the Emancipation Proclamation. After emanicpation, she was educated at Atlanta University in Georgia. Best known for The House of Bondage or Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves. She describes her work on the title page as, "The House of Bondage or Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves, Original and Life-like, as They Appeared in Their Old Plantation and City Slave Life; Together with Pen-pictures of the Peculiar Institution, with Sights and Insights into Their new Relations as Freedmen, Freemen, and Citizens.".
Eloise Bibb: (1878-1928?) Only 17 when she saw her first work, Poems in 1895, published by Monthly Review Press in Boston. After attending Oberlin College's Preparatory Academy, she taught in the New Orleans public school system. In 1903, she enrolled in Howard University's Teacher's College from which she graduated from in the winter of 1908. A few months later, she became head resident of the university's Colored Social Settlement House. Virginia W. Broughton: In Nashville, Tennessee, Virginia W. Broughton was among the first students at the preparatory school at Fisk College. She graduated in 1875 and became a teacher. In 1904 book, she wrote, Women's Work, as Gleaned from the Women of the Bible. This book was a handy synthesis of what she shared in her lectures and Bible studies. In 1907, she completed her bioaugraphy, Twenty Years' Experience of a Missionary (1907). Hallie Q. Brown: Black educator and elocutionist who pioneered in the movement for Black women's clubs in the United States. Daughter of former slaves, she was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and received a B.S. from Wilberforce University in Ohio in 1873. Brown helped to form the first British Chautauqua, and in England she lectured on behalf of the British Women's Temperance Association. In the United States, she helped to found the earliest women's clubs for Blacks and, from 1905 to 1912, served as president of the Ohio State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs. She also helped to found the Colored Women's League of Washington, D.C., a predecessor to the National Association of Colored Women. Among her books are Bits and Odds: A Choice Selection of Recitations (1880), First Lessons in Public Speaking (1920), and Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction (1926). Annie L. Burton: Annie L. Burton was born in Clayton, Alabama in 1858. Her mother was a house slave who ran from the plantation after being whipped, returning only after the Civil War completed and all slaves had been freed. Annie Burton moved to Boston, became a domestic servant and in 1888, married a man who worked as a valet in Braintree. In 1909 Burton published her book, Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days, a postbellum slave autobiography of an "ordinary" black woman, who refuses to be re-enslaved in either word or in deed. She offers extraordinary resistance to the emerging racial caste system of Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction America. The story is essentially about the power struggle between black women domestic workers and their white female employers. Olivia Ward Bush (May 23 1869 - 1944): Olivia Ward Bush was an American author, poet and journalist of both African and Montauk Native-American descent. Ward celebrated both of her heritages in her poetry and writing. She was a regular contributor to the Colored American magazine and wrote a column for the Westchester Record-Courier. She served as drama coach for Abyssinian Baptist Church's Community Center and wrote several plays, pageants, and short stories, most of which were never published. In 1899 her slim volume of verse, Original Poems, was published and received great reviews from Paul Laurence Dunbar. In 1914, a more substantial collection of prose and poetry was published: Driftwood. In the early 1920s she moved to Chicago and continued her artistic endeavors, focusing on drama. Julia A. J. Foote (1823-1900) Born in Schenectady, New York, Foote discovered the African Methodist Church and converted when she was fifteen years old. She became an itinerate preacher, traveling to Philadelphia, New York, Ohio, Michigan, California, and Canada before settling in Cleveland, Ohio. Preaching against slavery and appealing to women, her determination and eloquence drew a large following, white and black. Julia A. J. Foote's autobiography, A Brand Plucked from the Fire (1879), is representative of a large number of similar texts published by nineteenth-century black and white women who believed that Christianity had made them the spiritual equals of men and hence equally authorized to lead the church. In 1894 she became the first woman to become an AME Zion deacon. In 1900 she became the second woman to be ordained an elder. Lucy A. Delaney .(1830 - 1890) was an African-American author and former slave, remembered for her inspiring 1891 narrative From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or, Struggles for Freedom. Born Lucy Ann Berry in St. Louis, Missouri, Delaney was the daughter of slaves Polly Berry and a male slave whose name she does not reveal. Polly Berry had been born free in Illinois, but kidnapped in her childhood by slave-catchers and sold to a General Berry despite her free status. Delaney remembers the General as a kind owner; with his death in a duel, however, her father was sold to a plantation down the river by the family's new owners. Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935) Born in New Orleans, on 19 July 1875, Alice Ruth Moore was the daughter of Patricia Wright, a seamstress, and Joseph Moore, a merchant marine, and, due to her middle-class social status and racially mixed appearance, she enjoyed the diverse culture of the city. She graduated Straight University (now Dillard University) in 1892 and began her career as a teacher in the public school system of New Orleans. She married Paul Laurence Dunbar after a courtship of letters that began when Dunbar saw her picture accompanying one of her poems published in the Monthly Review in 1897 and they married in 1898. In 1899, she published The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories. She taught at Howard High School, and, during summer sessions, at the State College for Colored Students (Delaware State College) and at Howard University. Also see the Alice Dunbar-Nelson Papers. Frances E. W. Harper (1825 - ?) Frances Ellen Watkins (Harper) was born in 1825 in Baltimore, Maryland (a free state). In her early adult life, she moved around in the free states of Ohio and Pennsylvania where she worked as a teacher. While teaching at Little York, she was greatly bothered by the inequities and sufferings that her people had to suffer under the slave laws and resolved to take part in the effort to abolish slavery. In 1845, Harper's first book of poems, Forest Leaves, was published. She became active in the Anti-Slavery movement in the 1850's by using her gift for language as lecturer. In 1852, Harper took another teaching position in Pennsylvania. During this time, she lived in an Underground Railroad Station, where she witnessed the workings of the Underground Railroad and the movement of slaves toward freedom. This experience had a profound effect on Harper, her poetry, and her later work as an activist.
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