“I ask no monument, proud and high to arrest the gaze of the passers-by; all that my yearning spirit craves is bury me not in a land of slaves.”
Inscription, Contemplative Court, Smithsonian‘s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911) was a poet, abolitionist, and suffragist who first achieved renown through her antislavery poetry. Born in 1825, a free woman in Baltimore, she published her first book of poems at around the age of twenty. Before the Civil War, she moved to Pennsylvania, where she joined the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society and worked with William Stills helping slaves escape via the Underground Railroad and lectured for the abolition of slavery.
At the same time, she was busy writing. In 1854, she published her second book of poetry followed by a short story “The Two Offers” in the Anglo-African Journal. This was the first short story published by a black woman.
When her husband died during the war and left her with his three children and their own daughter to raise, she turned to writing and lecturing as a way to earn an 
income. During Reconstruction, she traveled to “every Southern state in the Union, save two” holding meetings for former slaves, particularly the women. “Now is the time,” she wrote, “for our women to begin to try to lift up their heads and plant the roots of progress under the hearthstone.” Her trip through the South inspired her next book of poems, Sketches of Southern Life. During this period she also published the verse story, Moses: A Story of the Nile.
Although a strong supporter of women’s rights, she broke with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony when they did not support the 15th Amendment and was a founding member of the American Woman Suffrage Association, though she went on to advocate for black women to form their own groups that would focus on their priorities. In 1894 with Mary Church Terrell, she formed the National Association of Colored Women.
In 1892, she published her most well-known work, the novel, Iola Leroy. In the introduction to this story of a mixed-race enslaved woman struggling to survive, William Still wrote: “The grand and enabling sentiments which have characterized all her utterances in laboring for the elevating of the oppressed will not be found missing from this book.”
The following excerpt is from one of the poems in Harper’s earliest book of poems, Forest Leaves. Long considered lost, a copy of this book has recently found.
Written by Frances Ellen (Watkins) Harper
Published by James Young, Printer, corner of Baltimore and Holliday Streets, Baltimore.
BIBLE DEFENSE OF SLAVERY
Take sackcloth of the darkest dye
And shroud the pulpits round,
Servants of him that cannot lie
Sit mourning on the ground.
Let holy horror blanch each cheek,
Pale ev’ry brow with fears,
And rocks and stones if ye could speak
Ye well might melt to tears.
Let sorrow breathe in ev’ry tone
And grief in ev’ry strain ye raise,
Insult not heaven’s majestic throne
With the mockery of praise.
A man whose light should be
The guide of age and youth,
Brings to the shrine of slavery
The sacrifice of truth.
For the fiercest wrongs that ever rose
Since Sodom’s fearful cry,
The word of life has been unclos’d
To give your God the lie.
An infidel could do no more
To hide his country’s guilty blot,
Than spread God’s holy record o’er
The loathesome leprous spot.
Oh, when ye pray for heathen lands,
And plead for dark benighted shores,
Remember slavery’s cruel hands
Make heathens at your doors.
Learn more about Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
A full copy of Forest Leaves can be downloaded here. https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:18265/
More on the discovery of Forest Leaves, see:
Ortner, Johanna. “Lost no More: Recovering Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s* Forest Leaves.” Common-place.org. 15, no. 4 (Summer 2015). http://common-place.org/book/lost-no-more-recovering-frances-ellen-watkins-harpers-forest-leaves/
For a deeper understanding of Forest Leaves read:
Rusert, Britt. ““Nor wish to live the past again”: Unsettling Origins in Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Forest Leaves.” Common-place.org. 16, no. 2 (Winter 2016). http://common-place.org/book/nor-wish-to-live-the-past-again-unsettling-origins-in-frances-ellen-watkins-harpers-forest-leaves-2/