Another Diva: Mattiwilda Dobbs

 Behold, the coloratura!

  

Mattiwilda Dobbs singing Mozart’s “Exsultate, Jubilate”

K. 165, under the baton of Walter Goehr, 1959.

Adele Addison: Bess

Octavia E. Butler, American Genius

"I have a huge and savage conscience that won't let me get away with things."

--Octavia E. Butler

 

In Remembrance of Our Sister

“We want more soul, a higher cultivation of all spiritual faculties. We need more unselfishness, earnestness, and integrity. We need men and women whose hearts are the homes of high and lofty enthusiasm and a noble devotion to the cause of emancipation, who are ready and willing to lay time, talent, and money on the altar of universal freedom.”   

--Frances E.W. Harper, The Anglo-African Magazine, 1859

Abolitionist, feminist, poet,. essayist, and novelist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was the author of the first short story published by an African American. “The Two Offers” was published in 1859 in the Anglo-African. Just click on the links below to read the short story, as well as important poems and essays by Harper.

“The Two Offers” (1859)

Poems by Frances E.W. Harper

“The Slave Mother” (1854)

“The Slave Auction” (1854)

“Bury Me in a Free Land” (1864)

Speeches by Frances E.W. Harper

“We Are All Bound Up Together” (1866)

“The Great Problem to be Solved” (1875)

“A Heritage of Scorn” (1891)

“Then and Now” (1900)