In the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the year 1858, a young woman entered a streetcar and sat down. The conductor came to her and insisted she leave, but she stayed quietly in her seat. A passenger intervened, asking if the woman in question might be permitted to sit in a corner. She did not move. When she reached her destination, the woman got up and tried to pay the fare, but the conductor refused to take her money. She threw it down on the floor and left.

What was that all about?

It was all about racism. The white conductor was giving the woman on the streetcar, Frances Ellen Watkins, a hard time because she was African American, and Watkins was having none of it. She believed in equality. She believed in treating all people with dignity and respect. Her work obliged her to travel from place to place, and she was used to enduring prejudice and injustice. She had the courage not to let it stop her.

Frances Ellen Watkins was born in 1825 in Maryland, when slavery was still legal. Born to free parents, she was never a slave. But by the age of three, she was an orphan, living with relatives in Baltimore. Her sad situation had one fortunate outcome. Her uncle William Watkins ran a school called the Academy for Negro Youth, and Frances received an excellent classical education there. Such schools for blacks were very rare.

By the age of fourteen, Frances had to leave school and go to work. She became a domestic servant. But this unfortunate situation also offered an opportunity. The Quaker family she worked for owned a bookshop and also had books in the house. Whenever time allowed, they gave her free access to all those books. She was an avid reader and soon became known as a writer too. By the age of twenty, she had written enough poems and essays to publish a small book.

Watkins eventually moved to Philadelphia, where there was a substantial community of well-educated and successful blacks—and a Unitarian church which she joined and belonged to for the rest of her life. She found her way there to William Still, a leader in the African American community. Still was chairman of the Vigilance Committee, organized to assist runaway slaves passing through Philadelphia. His home was the busiest station on the Underground Railroad—a place where people fleeing from slavery could rest and find assistance..

For Watkins, the antislavery cause opened a whole new career. Abolitionist papers began publishing her work, and, in 1854, she gave a public lecture on “The Education and the Elevation of the Colored Race.” She gave several more lectures that same week, and soon she had a full-time job as a traveling lecturer for the State Anti-Slavery Society of Maine. She drew large audiences, and judging from newspaper accounts and reviews, she did not disappoint them. New Englanders had long disapproved of women who spoke in public, but opinions were beginning to change, and Frances Watkins was a novelty. Audiences, whether black or white, male or female, wanted to hear this eloquent woman of color who outshone nearly all other orators on the circuit. They were charmed by her musical voice, her well-reasoned arguments, and her poetic language. She published a book of poems in 1854, and thousands of people who attended her lectures bought her book after hearing her speak.

She donated most of the money she earned from her books to the antislavery cause. Whenever she could, she sent a few dollars to William Still for the Vigilance Committee and the fugitives. At one point, he must have told Watkins to keep more of her earnings for herself. She wrote back, “Let me explain a few matters to you. In the first place, I am able to give something. In the second place, I am willing to do so.” In fact, she was more than willing and able. To her, helping humanity was a sacred calling, and she felt blessed to be able to do it. “Oh, is it not a privilege,” she wrote to a friend, “if you are sisterless and lonely, to be a sister to the human race, and to place your heart where it may throb close to down-trodden humanity?”

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper had not only the courage to care, but also the courage to speak out, and to push the world toward justice.

Adapted from a piece by Polly Peterson, originally published in Stirring the Nation’s Heart: Eighteen Stories of Prophetic Unitarians and Universalists of the Nineteenth Century (Boston: Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, 2010), and available as part of the UUA’s Tapestry of Faith curricula.