THE LEGACIES OF SLAVERY AND SISTERHOOD:
The Life and Work of Harriet Jacobs
October 6th and 7th, 2006
Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts
Pace University, New York, NY
Made possible by a generous grant from the Ford Foundation and other co-sponsors. >> View the sponsors' list
The life of Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897) spanned a crucial period of American history. Born into slavery that had, by the opening decades of the nineteenth century, expanded South and West, Jacobs escaped from her master in 1835. For the next seven years she lived in hiding above her grandmother's porch in Edenton, North Carolina, in a space nine feet long, seven feet wide, and three feet high. In 1842 Jacobs fled North; ten years later her freedom was purchased by her friend Cornelia Willis for $300. On the eve of the Civil War, Jacobs anonymously published her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself. Until her death nearly four decades later, Jacobs witnessed and participated in the momentous events unfolding before her eyes: the Civil War, the end of slavery, the birth and death of Reconstruction in the South, the ebb and flow of the women's suffrage movement, and the institutionalization of Jim Crow segregation. One of the great inspirations, advocates and supporters for feminism and abolition in the nineteenth century, Jacobs died forgotten in 1897.
Yet, contained in her extraordinary life is more than the story of a nineteenth century feminist and abolitionist. To this day, Harriet Jacobs is the only African-American woman held in slavery whose papers are known to exist. In these papers, a snapshot of the breadth of Jacobs' writings begins to emerge and spans an entire range of issues American society is still confronting in the 21st century. Thanks largely to more than three decades of persistence and extraordinary work by Dr. Jean Fagan Yellin, Distinguished Professor of English, Emerita at Pace University, Harriet Jacobs is finally receiving the recognition she deserves as an important American writer and activist.
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In 1987, Dr. Yellin published an edition of Incidents with Harvard University Press. Here Yellin established that Jacobs' book indeed was "written by herself," as its subtitle announces, and not by Lydia Maria Child, a white abolitionist writer whose authorship commentators had long assumed. In early 2004, Yellin published the widely acclaimed Harriet Jacobs: A Life, which chronicled Jacobs' incredible journey across the landscape of nineteenth century America. Her biography has won the prestigious Frederick Douglass Book Prize awarded by Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, the first biography ever to do so. Yellin also recently received grants from a variety of funders, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Archives, the Ford Foundation and the Delmas Foundation , to edit a two-volume collection of the papers of Harriet Jacobs; the manuscript was delivered to the University of North Carolina Press, in April 2006.
In conjunction with a commemoration of the extraordinary life of Harriet Jacobs, the publication of Yellin's biography of Jacobs, the ongoing edition of the Harriet Jacobs Papers published by UNC Press , and the 100th year anniversary of Pace University in 2006, we present The Legacies of Slavery and Sisterhood: The Life and Work of Harriet Jacobs. The symposium is part of the Pace University centennial celebration that has taken place all year long.
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