Читать книгу Frances E. W. Harper - Utz McKnight - Страница 10

It was from Sojourner Truth that Frances Harper saw firsthand the difficulty of making a living as a public speaker. To raise sufficient money for her travels and sustenance while on the speaking circuit, Truth would sell small commemorative items related to herself and her story at her talks. Truth’s image on sale, in the pamphlets, was for everyone present a natural extension of the tradition of printing and public newspapers in the free African American community throughout the Northeast at the time. Instead of ignoring the growth of print culture in the African American community, we should consider how important this must have been for Harper, as an aspiring poet and writer – someone who sought to reach an audience with her written word (Peterson, 1995, pp. 310–12).

The Liberator, a newspaper published first in the 1830s by Garrison, was constantly seeking submissions from African Americans, for example, as was The Colored American. Once Douglass started publishing the newspaper The North Star in 1847, Harper and other aspiring African American writers were given a ready forum in it. Frederick Douglass’ Paper and Douglass’ Monthly, his other two newspaper publications, also published their work (McHenry, 2002, p. 116; Washington, 2015, pp. 61–6). While certainly there was an eager White American readership for this work, there was also an extensive African American audience for these newspapers and for literary magazine content. African American literary societies had been an important mainstay of the free African American community since their inception, and before the founding of the new nation. The newspapers that circulated within the free African American communities emphasized the importance of reading and education as a means of moral and political progress. It was in Freedom’s Journal, published from 1827 to 1829, that African American literary societies and their participants, such as David Walker and Maria Stewart, were able to find a larger audience for their writings. In 1837, The Colored American began publishing work dedicated to the audiences from these literary societies (McHenry, 2002, p. 102).