Introduction Approximately around 1859, Harriet E. Wilson, a female African-American slave and novelist, published her autobiographical novel titled “Our Nig: Sketches from the Life of a Free Black.” Wilson was considered the first female African-American novelist and one of the first African-Americans to publish a novel in the United States. In her novel, Wilson expresses her life struggle as an orphan and a slave while serving under the Bellmonts, a cruel white family in a New England Town. Harriet E. Wilson, as an orphan, is left to the racial abuse of Mrs. Bellmont’s surging violent physical and verbal eruptions, which she uses to rule her family. Wilson’s impactful novel exposes the racial landscape of the United States before the Civil …show more content…
Lucy Stone grew up in a sizeable family in Massachusetts and was raised under the idea of the female role in society. Despite this, she was determined to better her knowledge and graduated from Oberlin College in 1847. She furthered her activism for Women’s rights and organized the Worcester First National Woman’s Rights Convention in 1850. Most significantly, she became the president of the 1856 National Woman’s Rights convention in 1856. It is these novels and authors who inspire the development, creation, and expansion of civil rights groups, not just for African-American’s rights, but for women too. With the increasingly common formation of these civil rights groups and their quest for the expansion of these civil rights, groups like the American Association of University Women, The Woman’s Rights Convention, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and Allgemeiner Deutscher Frauenverein aimed at …show more content…
The NAACP was founded on February 12th, 1909; in a time where the horrid practice of lynching was prominent, which therefore, partly resulted in the formation of the NAACP. The founders: W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Archibald Grimke, Mary White Ovington, Henry Moskowitz, Lillian Wald, William English Walling, and Oswald Garrison Villard created the organization when “called for a meeting to discuss racial justice.” Their goal was to secure for all people the rights of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution. The crisis of the lynching is highlighted from the document ” Lynching from the Negro's Point of View” and states, “Before 1904 was three months old, thirty-one negroes had been lynched. Of this number, fifteen were murdered within one week in Arkansas, and one was shot to death in Springfield, Ohio, by a mob composed of men who did not take the trouble to wear masks.” It was this crisis that gave rise to the NAACP and drove its expansion. This also gave rise to a leader within the founders that generated strategies for the NAACP to grow- Joel Spingarn. Spingarn was born on May 17th, 1875 and died July 26th, 1939 and “was elected board chairman of the NAACP in 1915 and
Ida B. Wells continued the fight against mob violence and lynching to the end of her life. She showed us the way towards achieving real social justice by participating in the founding of the NAACP -- the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People -- in 1909. This alliance of whites and blacks represented a new stage in the crusade to stop racial violence and inequality. The great legal, moral, and political victories won by the NAACP and the civil rights movement stand as proof of one of Ida Wells' deepest convictions. Wells understood that justice could not be fully achieved without interracial cooperation.
“I think, with never-ending gratitude, that the young women of today do not and can never know at what price their right to free speech and to speak at all in public has been earned.” (www.doonething.org). Lucy Stone was born in West Brookfield, Massachusetts on August 13, 1818. Her parents, Francis Stone and Hannah Matthews, were abolitionists and Congregationalists. Stone retained their anti-slavery opinions but rejected the Congregationalist Church after it criticized abolitionists. Along with her anti-slavery attitude, Lucy Stone also pursued a higher education. She completed local schools at the age of sixteen and saved money until she could attend a term at Mount Holyoke Seminary five years later. In 1843, Stone enrolled at the Oberlin Collegiate Institute (later Oberlin College). With her graduation in 1847, she became the first Massachusetts woman to earn a bachelor’s degree. However, Lucy Stone was not done expressing her abolitionist and feminist beliefs to the public (anb.org).
Jacobs, Harriet, and Yellin, Jean. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press
Harriet E. Wilson is an African American woman who based her story, Our Nig, on her own personal accounts during her enslavement. Our Nig is a unique story because it gives another perspective of different forms of slavery (i.e., Northern indentured servants) and sheds light on the hardships faced by female indentured servants. However, there are many other reasons why Our Nig is distinctive, including its compelling story, its analyses that give a detailed breakdown, its interesting language of the period, and ability to produce a reaction from oneself.
In the earliest part of Harriet?s life the whole idea of slavery was foreign to her. As all little girls she was born with a mind that only told her place in the world was that of a little girl. She had no capacity to understand the hardships that she inherited. She explains how her, ?heart was as free from care as that of any free-born white child.?(Jacobs p. 7) She explains this blissful ignorance by not understanding that she was condemned at birth to a life of the worst kind oppression. Even at six when she first became familiar with the realization that people regarded her as a slave, Harriet could not conceptualize the weight of what this meant. She say?s that her circumstances as slave girl were unusua...
After many years of battling for equality among the sexes, people today have no idea of the trails that women went through so that women of future generations could have the same privileges and treatment as men. Several generations have come since the women’s rights movement and the women of these generations have different opportunities in family life, religion, government, employment, and education that women fought for. The Women’s Rights Movement began with a small group of people that questioned why human lives, especially those of women, were unfairly confined. Many women, like Sojourner Truth and Fanny Fern, worked consciously to create a better world by bringing awareness to these inequalities. Sojourner Truth, prominent slave and advocate
Jacobs, Harriet A.. Incidents in the life of a slave girl. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988
In her story Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs presents what life was like living as a female slave during the 19th century. Born into slavery, she exhibits, to people living in the North who thought slaves were treated fairly and well, how living as a slave, especially as a female slave during that time, was a heinous and horrible experience. Perhaps even harder than it was if one had been a male slave, as female slaves had to deal with issues, such as unwanted sexual attention, sexual victimization and for some the suffering of being separated from their children. Harriet Jacobs shows that despite all of the hardship that she struggled with, having a cause to fight for, that is trying to get your children a better life
Among the many solutions to racial inequality, African American mutual aid and benefit societies were created. For instance, the National Negro Business League that was established by Booker T. Washington in 1900 aided black-owned businesses and eventually flourished into a multitude of branches by 1907. Mary Ovington founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACp) in 1909, which worked toward abolishing segregation and discrimination and gaining civil rights for African Americans. The NAACP was a vital stepping stone toward the Civil Rights Movement of 1955 because it publicly emitted the message of racial equality to various crowds of people, accumulated many members over the course of a decade, and solved racial issues throughout the Jim Crow era. The commencement of the National Urban League also worked to improve job opportunities and housing for black citizens (Cayton et al.
Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself. Ed. Jennifer Fleischner. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2010. Print.
On February 12th, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was founded by a multiracial group of activists, who answered "The Call," in the New York City, NY. They initially called themselves the National Negro Committee. Founded in 1909, the NAACP, or National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, has been active in its attempts to break legal ground and forge better opportunities for African Americans. At the beginning in 1909, some twenty persons met together in New York City for the purpose of utilizing the public interest in the Lincoln Centennial in behalf of African Americans. The history, function, purpose, and current activities of the organization are important to work on behalf of the rights of colored people including Native Americans, African Americans and Jews.
Slavery is a term that can create a whirlwind of emotions for everyone. During the hardships faced by the African Americans, hundreds of accounts were documented. Harriet Jacobs, Charles Ball and Kate Drumgoold each shared their perspectives of being caught up in the world of slavery. There were reoccurring themes throughout the books as well as varying angles that each author either left out or never experienced. Taking two women’s views as well as a man’s, we can begin to delve deeper into what their everyday lives would have been like. Charles Ball’s Fifty Years in Chains and Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl were both published in the early 1860’s while Kate Drumgoold’s A Slave Girl’s Story came almost forty years later
The association was formed as the direct result of the lynching (1908) of two blacks in Springfield, Ill. The incident produced a wide response by white Northerners to a call by Mary W. Ovington, a white woman, for a conference to discuss ways of achieving political and social equality for blacks. This conference led to the formation (1910) of the NAACP, headed by eight prominent Americans, seven white and one, William E. B. Du Bois, black (wikipedia 1). The selection of Du Bois was significant, for he was a black who had rejected the policy of gradualism advocated by Booker T. Washington and demanded immediate equality for blacks. From 1910 to 1934 Du Bois was the editor of the association's periodical The Crisis, which reported on race relations around the world. The new organization grew so rapidly that by 1915 it was able to organize a partially successful boycott of the motion picture The Birth of a Nation, which portrayed blacks of the Reconstruction era in a distorted light( Spartacus 2).
Analyzing the narrative of Harriet Jacobs in the context of the writings of W.E.B. Du bois serves to demonstrate how slavery prompted the weary and self-denigrating attitudes of Negro Americans during the subsequent Reconstruction period. However, it is important to note that Harriet Jacobs does not embody the concept of double-consciousness because slavery effectively stripped away her sexuality and femininity, therefore reducing her to one identity--that of a
In Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the author subjects the reader to a dystopian slave narrative based on a true story of a woman’s struggle for self-identity, self-preservation and freedom. This non-fictional personal account chronicles the journey of Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897) life of servitude and degradation in the state of North Carolina to the shackle-free promise land of liberty in the North. The reoccurring theme throughout that I strive to exploit is how the women’s sphere, known as the Cult of True Womanhood (Domesticity), is a corrupt concept that is full of white bias and privilege that has been compromised by the harsh oppression of slavery’s racial barrier. Women and the female race are falling for man’s