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After all whether they encourage or discourage me, I belong to this race, and when it is down I belong to a down race; when it is up I belong to a risen race.
Frances E. W. Harper, Letter to William Still, Greenville, Georgia, 29 March 1870 (Still 773)
These words of Frances Harper encapsulate the loyalty many African-American writers felt to their race during the social instability following the Civil War. As activists, they immediately set out a blueprint for the newly reconstructing nation, advocating the moral values, education, and suffrage that they felt were fundamental to attaining equality. As creative writers, their stories, poems, and novels represent the "trials and triumphs" of the emerging black middle class and affirm its upward social mobility to a white and black readership (Harper, Trial and Triumph [1888-89]). Between these roles, a crisis in political confidence arose among middle-class black and white reformers, who struggled to secure black suffrage while anxious about maintaining their own social level.
As a black woman, Harper would have been sensitive to charges that she was less genteel than her middle-class audiences, and, in a radical response, she sought to dismantle the class structure upon which discrimination against African Americans rests. Whereas, like Frederick Douglass and other African-American slave narrative writers, she could use Christian rhetoric and elevated diction to affirm arguments against slavery and to align with middle-class readers, Harper also aligned with former slaves and poor whites and envisioned a classless society. In her impressive sequence of poems, Sketches of Southern Life (1872), she promotes political solidarity among freedmen and the grass-roots workings of democracy. Sketches retells the history of reconstruction from the perspective of a freedwoman, Aunt Chloe, but refrains from dialect, thus rejecting stereotyped black voices. In so doing, Sketches enacts the social elevation for African Americans its author espoused, and it also answers contemporary critics who take an apologetic tone toward the recovery of poets like Harper, who, despite their political importance and artistic contributions, have been deemed artistically inadequate.1
As the most widely read African-American female poet since Phillis Wheatley, Harper's poetry has been unduly neglected.2 The reason lies in the ambiguity of Harper's place in the modern literary canon, whose critics devalue the simple,...