“And Then Forget”: Charlotte (“Lottie”) Forten and the Nineteenth-Century Black Feminist Project to be Remembered

Antebellum Black abolitionist women were proto-race women. They were moral leaders of the biracial abolitionist cause. They were productive writers and helped form mutual aid and anti-slavery societies. However, their contemporaries often overlooked them and their contributions to abolitionism. Freeborn author, activist, and educator Charlotte L. Forten (1837–1914) was a proto-race woman. She served as a personal, intellectual, and relational bridge between antebellum abolitionist women and the race women born during and after the Civil War era. This article situates Forten within the historiography of nineteenth-century race women whose private, semi-private, and public writings, activist pedagogy, and relationship-building demanded that Black women and their ideas be remembered.