Black suffragist Frances Watkins Harper rises in new Germantown mural

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When artist Athena Scott got a job with Mural Arts Philadelphia to design a mural in honor of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, she had never heard of the 19th-century suffragist and abolitionist.

Scott relied heavily on the resources of the Penn State University’s Center for Black Digital Research, where she learned Harper was the first Black woman to tour the country as a paid anti-slavery speaker. Harper chastised the racism of white women fighting for voting rights, and was one of the first Black women to publish a novel, “Iola Leroy” (1892).

“All these things in this one woman,” Scott said. “She made such an impact in everything that she touched.”

Scott placed Harper in the center of the mural on the Greene Street Friends School building at Armat and Greene streets in Germantown. But she is not alone.

Surrounding Harper are portraits of other prominent Black women of the same era:  Nannie Helen Burroughs, who started a school for Black girls in Washington, D.C.; Mary Ann Shadd Cary, the first Black woman to publish a newspaper; Harriet Forten Purvis, founder of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society; and her niece Charlotte Forten Grimké, a teacher who educated formerly enslaved people newly freed after the Civil War.

“She is part of a collective of Black women,” said Gabrielle Foreman, co-founder and co-director of the Center for Black Digital Research, of Harper.

“These are women from Philadelphia who were holding down that activist, organizational and democratic commitment to making this country what it can be at a moment where it had not yet gotten there,” she said.

This year is the bicentennial of Harper’s birth. To mark the anniversary the Center for Black Digital Studies worked with the staff of Greene Street Friends to devise a teaching curriculum about Harper and the activist work she was involved in.

One of the phrases for which Harper is most recognized comes from a speech she gave at the National Women’s Rights Convention in 1866, in which she exclaimed the urgent need for the right to vote, while also warning that Black women need more than suffrage to live freely and equally.

“We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity,” Harper said in her convention speech. “Society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving a curse in its own soul.”

The excerpt is included on the outdoor mural.

“She is committing to reconciliation, to love, to leading with empathy as a core of democracy,” Foreman said. “Why do we not know her name like Sojourner Truth? How do we not know her name like Harriet Tubman?”

Harper’s recognition may be on the rise. In 2020, a bronze statue of her was included in a monument erected at the Pennsylvania State Capital in Harrisburg, simultaneously marking the 150th anniversary of the 15th Amendment, which gave Black men the right to vote, and the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote.

Jane Golden, founder and director of Mural Arts Philadelphia, hopes the Greene Street mural becomes the tip of the iceberg for people unfamiliar with Harper, pointing to both the teaching curriculum and the patchwork of portraits in the mural as guideposts for further exploration.

“Anyone who drives around the city and says, ‘That’s a nice mural,’ and it ends there: They need to look again and again and again,” Golden said.

“They need to go like this to the wall,” she said, miming the opening of a curtain, “and see everything that is behind it, beyond it, around it and in it.”