Frances E. W. Harper’s Radical Black Feminist Politics in The Underground Railroad

Abstract: In literary scholarship there have been few sustained engagements with Harper’s letters despite the fact that they offer a valuable space for recovering Harper’s own understanding of the impact of her work, including her personal observations of the state of the nation in the antebellum and postbellum period as she traveled and lectured in the North and the South. Indeed, her articulation of a politics of resistance very much lies within a genealogy of more widely recognized Black radical figures like David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, and a post-Garrisonian Frederick Douglass. This article attests that Frances E. W. Harper stands alongside these nineteenth-century Black radicals and with her letters published in William Still’s The Underground Railroad as its focus, argues that Harper presents her own radical appeal to enslaved and free African Americans to resist slavery and oppression. Moreover, during the antebellum era, Civil War, and Reconstruction she calls out both widespread racial violence and quotidian efforts to suppress their freedom and movement, prophesizing that they are “on the threshold of a new era” and that they must “consecrate their lives” to uplifting their race.