Lawrence Jackson, a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of English and History at Hopkins, created the annual Donald V. Bentley Memorial Lecture in memory of his good friend who lost his life to gun violence and founded the Billie Holiday Center for Liberation Arts to “begin a regular process of sharing resources from the arts and sciences of the Homewood Campus with other portions of the city.” Each year, the center sponsors a free public lecture, and in celebration of her 200th birthday, the most recent lecture covered Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, the most prolific black female writer of the 19th century and among the first African American women to be published in the United States.
On April 9, the Baltimore Museum of Art hosted the sixth annual Donald V. Bentley Memorial Lecture, The Freedom Bell: An Evening with Frances Harper at the BMA. Tracey Beale, the director of public programs at the Baltimore Museum of Art, gave a brief introduction about the Billie Holiday Center for Liberation Arts and highlighted its collaboration with Hopkins and its memorial lectures. She also introduced Jackson, who set the tone for the lecture by opening with his poem, “The Flight of William Bowser.” William Bowser was a Maryland native who led a slave revolt shortly after the birth of Harper. The poem echoed the ideas of perseverance and revolution that Harper’s life embodied.
The lecture, detailing Harper’s life, was given by historian Martha S. Jones, a professor at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institution at Hopkins, who has evoked Harper in all of her works. Her address detailed the creation of the Hopkins Hospital's orphan asylum and Harper’s eventual visitation that disrupted the pre-conceived, rigid notions of what black orphaned girls were capable of; moreover, it covered the breadth of Harper’s activism and work, analyzing how her speeches and poetry were effective in challenging the suffocating racism and sexism of the 19th century.
By the 1850s, Harper was already established as an educator and published poet. In that decade, she also broke new ground; she joined the anti-slavery lecture circuit, a rarity for a black woman, and she immediately earned notice. One woman's magazine remarked how Harper tore down barriers. Mary Ann Shadd Cary, an American-Canadian anti-slavery activist who edited her own newspaper in the 1850s, described Harper's early speeches as fervent, eloquent and with almost superhuman force and power over the spellbound audience.
Harper’s success was partly due to her style. She adopted a ladylike comportment, even as her ideas were sharp edged and highly political. Audiences admired her unassuming manner, graceful oratory, fervency, pathos and truthfulness. She delivered outbursts of eloquent indignation in a style of speaking, which was highly poetical, quite touching and effective.
Before the decade was over, Harper shared the podium with many of the era's best known anti-slavery speakers — men like H. Ward Douglas, Robert Purpis, Charles Reedman, William Still and William Howard Day — along with white women lecturers, such as Lucretia Mott and Josephine Griffin. Still, for Harper, appearing on the anti-slavery stage was fraught, even dangerous.
During many months on the road, she endured threatening confrontations with drivers, conductors and engineers who loomed constantly. Harper recalled, “I have been insulted on several railroad cars. The other day, in attempting to ride in one of the city cars, after I had entered, the conductor came to me, and wanted me to go out on the platform [...] As a matter of course, I did not. Some one interfered, and asked or requested that I might be permitted to sit in a corner. I did not move, but kept the same seat. When I was about to leave, he refused my money, and I threw it down on the car floor, and got out, after I had ridden as far as I wished.”
By spring, 1864, Harper was lecturing regularly about the consequences of war and her hopes for reconstruction. She visited Black communities near and far, and when it came time to celebrate the abolition of slavery in her home state of Maryland, Harper, who had long lived in exile, joined the day's cheers for a finally free Maryland.
In early 1865, Harper set off on a schedule that was nothing short of grueling, covering hundreds of miles between New York City, Indianapolis and Philadelphia. She crisscrossed New England, covering Boston, Roxbury, Framingham and Lowell in Massachusetts, as well as Providence in Rhode Island. She headlined commemorations and celebrations. She shared the bill and the podium with illustrious men, including William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglas. Cary had remarked that Harper was the greatest female speaker ever. And in the post-war years, Harper proved her right.
When she spoke before the American Equal Rights Association in 1866, she did not mince words about the rights of women. She faced down figures no less formidable than Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan Anthony, and she was at her best, the only black woman to speak in a gathering brimming with skilled orators.
Most often quoted is her admonition: “They are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity.” It was a fierce reframing of American politics that rejected differences of race and of sex. Harper did not dwell on property rights for the ballot. Instead, her grievances emanated from the everyday indignities that black women endured on the nation's trains and streetcars, being roughed up, ridiculed and refused service. All this, while white women passengers watched.
She was one of America’s first truly intersectional feminists, someone whose analysis rejected racism, and sexism, along with differences of class and origin. Harper's concerns only continued to broaden in the post-Civil War years, and she turned her attention to orphan children, those uniquely sheltered in care.
She used her platform to raise funds and also her name and talents in support of orphans. She lifted up the work of women, such as those of the St. Louis Temperance Union branch, which had established its own orphan asylum. And here, for interest was as much personal as it was political. Born in 1825, here in Baltimore, by age 2 or 3, Harper herself was parentless.
Her mother, born enslaved, only to be freed by the diligence of her own mother, died, and as for Harper's father, scholars of Harper's life still know nothing about him. Harper, before orphanages for black children were well established in Baltimore, was taken in by a remarkable aunt and uncle. They not only sheltered the small girl, but also saw to her education and vocation during the 1820s and ‘30s by raising her in a home that teemed with learning faith and radical politics.
Theirs was a world shaped by slavery, anti-black racism and, even among some black leaders, skepticism about how far a young woman's aspirations should take her. Harper's young life was troubled and also fortunate. She made the most of the active fortune we know while building upon a foundation that few young black girls, even those born free, would never know before the Civil War.
In her 1891 poem “Out in the Cold,” Harper reflects on justice. Harper knew herself to be more fortunate than most children left out in the dark and cold, and it is her humility that permits her to see herself in the face of the children who animate the poem. The poem reflects the circumstances that Harper saw as she traveled through her time with women and girls, many former enslaved people among them.
When Harper visited the girls in the Hopkins orphan asylum in 1895, she had a critical message. The girls there were trained to go into domestic service in the homes of Baltimore's elite. They would not be trained as educators or poets. They would know too little about how a woman like Harper made for herself a private as well as a public life. The girls, instead, could expect to live lives of domestic service, expect to face women who might not honor their purity and men who sought to compromise it.
Harper's presence counteracted this expectation. She was a teacher, poet, advocate, leader and novelist; the very fact of Francis Harper exposed the lie that ran underneath the work of the asylum. Black girls, even those orphaned and coming up the hard way, might and surely could expect to become more than domestic servants.
Harper's message conveyed by her very person, her careful outfit, her precise diction, her commanding presence, was that she, like the girl's resident in the asylum, could not be bound by a scheme designed to keep her in her place. Harper shattered whatever quiet understanding might have held the asylum together.
For those straining to remember the asylum and understand its meaning for the Hopkins of today, Harper reminds us that in contrast, its rigid structures were not enough to hold her, and the possibilities of reform, back. The asylum began to shut its doors in 1914, but not before a new campus was built. If you stood in the east garden of the orphan asylum, you could watch the university begin to take shape, rising on the hillside.
It was the start of a new ambitious research institution that for generations trained young men of privilege, expecting that they would themselves someday not only make the world, but that they would head the elite homes that relied on the services of girls, such as those trained in the asylum. Hopkins was erecting halls that would launch white boys into limitless futures.
Jones ended her lecture saying, “To borrow Frances Harper's most openly quoted refrain, they were all the girls of the asylum and the boys of the university, but they were, like us, ‘all bound up together.’”
After the lecture was over, African American spirituals in Harper’s honor were performed by Baltimore’s Jonathan Pettus Chorale, which includes many alumni of the celebrated Morgan State University Choir. Through art, particularly music and poetry, Harper’s revolutionary heritage has been preserved, but it also invites reflection on hope and resilience and a continued future for progressive growth.
