![]() ![]() ![]() It’s the first of these meetings to be held since the Civil War ended a little over a year ago, so the stakes are high. Up ahead is a large gothic church where this year’s women’s rights convention is about to take place. She’s a forty-year-old Black woman, wearing her version of a power suit, a custom-made dress of Union army blue. ![]() Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a renowned poet and abolitionist, is making her way down Broadway toward 15th Street in Manhattan. Laura: Imagine with me that it’s the morning of May 10, 1866. In this exceptionally emotional episode, Sharia and Bettye paint a vivid portrait of a woman whose vision of liberation resonates deeply today-and whose spirit is still with those who continue the pursuit of justice and equality. Bettye’s research has helped recover Harper’s forgotten contributions to the abolitionist, suffrage, and temperance causes. ![]() Laura also spends time with historian Bettye Collier-Thomas in Bettye’s extensive personal archive. To help tell Frances’s story, host Laura Free meets up with Sharia Benn, a writer, researcher and theater artist who has spent a decade portraying Frances for public audiences. She wasn’t about to let that happen without a fight. But she also knew that politics and prejudice could shatter this tentative alliance, with devastating consequences. After the Civil War, many abolitionists and women’s rights activists saw an opportunity to team up and advance equality for all.Īfrican American author and orator Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was hopeful, too. ![]()
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