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From the time of the ratification of the 15th Amendment in 1870, Frances Harper was involved in the Association for the Advancement of Women, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the Universal Peace Union, the American Women Suffrage Association, the International Council of Women, the National Council of Women, and the Women’s Congress. She was also a founding member of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) (Gordon, 1997, p. 49; Parker, 2010, pp. 128–38; Terborg-Penn, 1998, pp. 47, 85). With the exception of the NACW, the other associations were dominated and almost exclusively controlled by White women, and Frances Harper was usually the only Black woman in a position of leadership (Jones, 2007, p. 171; Painter, 1996, p. 231; Parker, 2010, p. 137).

Bettye Collier-Thomas points out that the only other African American leader in the nineteenth century, besides Frances Harper, who was able to work extensively with White Americans within a major national organization, was Frederick Douglass, in his work with William Lloyd Garrison in the American Anti-Slavery Society prior to the Civil War (Gordon, 1997, p. 56; Jones, 2007, p. 198) After the War, Frances Harper was the main Black national organizational figure within the Suffragist and Temperance movements. She was able to define a personal social equality with the major White women figures of her day, in terms of participation, presentations, and organizational skills. She was one of the most successful essayists, poets, and novelists of her generation, and the White women had to respect both her acumen and her public presence, if not her person. But her participation also required that White women had to address the issue of racial equality within these women’s organizations and conferences (Parker, 2010, p. 128; Terborg-Penn, 1998, p. 109). From 1883 to 1900, Frances Harper was in the executive leadership of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (Gordon, 1997, p. 57; Jones, 2007, p. 201), which was the most powerful and far-reaching women’s organization in the country (Tetrault, 2014, p. 87). By the 1890s, it had become more apparent to African American women that these national associations and organizations led predominantly by White women were not effective vehicles for advocating for the rights of African Americans. This is not to ignore the very significant work that Frances Harper achieved by working within these organizations, but she was fighting a losing battle because of the deterioration in the rights of Blacks in what is rightly called the nadir of the free African American experience in this country (Bruce, 1989, p. 3; Collier-Thomas, 1997, pp. 49–65, 86; Parker, 2010, pp. 133–8; Terborg-Penn, 1998).

Lynchings had become an almost daily occurrence throughout the US by the 1890s, and Blacks had no rights that Whites needed to respect. A lynching should be thought of as an extra-legal killing to establish a local description of racial authority. It is a consolidation of the idea of Whiteness as the possibility of a violence that is exceptional and necessary to preserve or secure advantages over the possibility of there being rights held by others, against the claims of those who were defined as White. According to Harper, that the local state governments had gradually capitulated to this authority, and were unable to successfully resist the usurpation of their institutional processes by this idea of racial difference after the potential was created for more expansive democratic reforms by the effects of the War, is the great national tragedy (Foster, 1990, pp. 217–19).

This collective acceptance of violence as required against those who sought to define Black equality was different from the authority that had defined the violence of enslavement. The codes and laws of Jim Crow that established legal punishments to enforce Black inequality were not slavery by another name. These laws were enacted on a free people, for a generation born after 1865 that had never known slavery as a condition. It is important to call the terrible conditions that lynching and Jim Crow laws created for Black people by their name, rather than reduce the struggle for equality that occurred to that which had ended two decades before. It was impossible to impose slavery again on Black people after the Civil War. This fact continues to be important as a description of racial politics, and the idea of racial inequality after Emancipation should not be reduced to a claim about slavery. Rather, what happened – and Frances Harper was at the forefront of this fight in the 1880s until her death – was that Black inequality was defined through the use of punitive and comprehensive social controls. Even if for a time Black men did vote, run for office, and establish businesses that catered to both Black and White customers, by the end of the century the political rights promised by the Amendments were gradually made largely symbolic.

In this political situation, the new generation of Black women leaders, and increasingly Frances Harper as well, did not see the utility of working within these larger White associations, instead forming their own organizations such as the NACW (Parker, 2010, p. 130; Terborg-Penn, 1998, p. 79). By the 1890s, Frances Harper had to contend with a new politics within the Black community. This new position argued that accumulating wealth while accepting the terms given by the continuing racial segregation, codified for example in Plessy v. Ferguson, would lead to a form of social equality in the absence of political equality. Harper’s poetry and essays from the last two decades of her life reflect her criticism of these narrow aims for Black community development (Gordon, 1997, p. 60; Parker, 2010, pp. 133–4).

We come now to an understanding of the reason for the historical erasure of Frances Harper from her place, as one of its most important citizens, in the annals of American society. The need to minimize the importance of Black women in the major women’s rights organizations, starting from the 1880s, led to the removal or marginalization of the record of the contributions of Frances Harper from organizational history (Terborg-Penn, 1998, pp. 33–5; Tetrault, 2014, pp. 133–5). At the same time, by the 1890s, Jim Crow politics meant that examples of Black artists, writers, and poets who were exceptional, and particularly those who argued in their work for equality between Blacks and Whites, had to be obscured or forgotten.

The very factors that defined the life of Frances Harper – education, charismatic and powerful speaking, successful activism, her many volumes of poetry about the consequences of racism and misogyny in the society, the four novels about social conditions and the ambition of independent talented women, and her essays about the politics of race and gender – all these accomplishments had to be reduced for future generations to the short story “The Two Offers” published in 1859, and the one major novel, Iola Leroy, published in 1892, if she was mentioned at all. Shorn of the context for an understanding of the sophistication of the politics that informed both pieces – though, again, but a small portion of her oeuvre – Frances Harper was described by academics and literary communities in the decades after her death as merely an early Black writer and sentimental poet of little consequence to the society. Generations would pass before her poetry and novels would be published again as significant artifacts of American literary and African American political history. Without the ability of African Americans to enter the academy as professors in increased numbers in the 1960s, it would never have happened. In a very real sense, our understanding of the life of this poet and activist, and of the development of our democratic polity in the last half of the nineteenth century, would not be possible without the continued work of Black academics today, a testament to the importance of Black lives to the understanding of how the United States continues to develop as a democratic society.

Frances Harper did not fit the model of the pathetic Black person in need of succor and charity from White benefactors, and she had not been a slave who escaped or was set free, aided by White people. She refused to countenance the social and legal walls being built around the idea of a distinction between the races that could be used to establish inequality for Black people. That some could succeed as exceptions to the expectation of a seemingly proven and innate Black inferiority to White people was, for Frances Harper, unacceptable. What we see in the novel Iola Leroy is an attempt to address this failure of conviction among Black people about their own right to political equality. Harper describes a vision of community development through the activity of her protagonist Iola Leroy, from the Civil War to the 1890s, that is an alternative to what has actually occurred. This is an offering, again, to her readers of a capacious vision of a racial equality to come – one that never arrived. Frances Harper was not just an incredible person, she was always also an incredible Black woman, and the possibility that she would symbolize and represent the Black community as its ideal for decades after her death in 1911 was, for many, an unacceptable concession to the idea of gender and racial equality.

We literally can’t trace the influence of Harper’s ideas in Black political culture and American organizational history, because these had to be repudiated and assigned for their origin to others. Problems of political vision that were not hers were readily attributed to her cause. In the same sense of a necessary rejection, her poetry and novels were denigrated as simply low culture, in contrast to the work published in high-culture magazines of the period, and described as too political, as protest poetry – as a vernacular, common voice lacking in sophistication. Others have disagreed, for generations, with the possibility that racial and gender injustice, and the description of Black life that her poetry and writing, her activism, represented, were topics worth exploring in their own right, instead of as a description of White largesse and sympathy (Peterson, 1995, p. 333).

The work of Frances Harper was also too radical – too convinced of the need to ask both Black and White, men and women, to answer the call of a mutual implication in the racial and gendered description of injustice in the society. Her work was simply too intersectional, too invasive of social norms that have prevailed in the society to this day, and that still require racial equality to be defined by gender inequality. The one covers the other, and around again, like a shell game where the idea is that there is nothing really there to begin with – no difference, no purpose beyond the perpetuation of the inequality itself.

It should be remembered, some 50 years after the first African American Studies program was established at a traditionally White university, that not just Frances Harper, but generations of writers, poets, and thinkers have had to be rediscovered for their importance to just this American democratic polity that we as Black people desire to create. But it really is the change in ambition for all of us with regard to race and gender equality that allows for the work of recovery that has occurred now across several generations of contemporary scholars. As Frances Harper’s poetry and fiction writing, lectures and essays are brought forward to our literary and political conscience, not only are we reminded of what has been lost by generations of a determined, brutal and inexorable racism, but also we begin to see the genius of a savant, a Black woman who gave her life to our cause. We begin to understand the call to conscience that she devoted her life’s work to discovering.

It has taken us so long to understand our contribution to the world in the midst of all that was endured in the long song of Black suffering after the Civil War – the lynchings, the chain gangs, the segregation to demean and reduce the ambitions of a community, the poverty and violence experienced as a people, the divisiveness and want that have been fostered to contain and exploit us all – everything that is still being done to Black people. The research made possible by the social organizations that established programs of study in African American Studies should be understood to be still doing the work that we need done, allowing us to consider the importance of those writers and poets, thinkers and public servants, who, together, might provide us with another country – another vision of how we can live together. Through her words, Frances Harper has offered us “a fairer hope, a brighter morn” (Graham, 1988, p. 199). We need to come to an understanding of what her poetry and writing are for us today, so that it can lead us to another shore, a different nation – one that Frances Harper envisioned in her work for racial and gender equality.