Latest / Sankofa Chronicles: A Black History Podcast
September 5 in Black History: Harriet Wilson's Our Nig & Léopold Sédar Senghor Becomes President of Senegal
September 5th isn't on most calendars — but it should be.
On this date in Black history, two Black writers on two different continents picked up a pen and refused to disappear. In 1859, Harriet E. Wilson published Our Nig in Boston — generally considered the first novel published by an African-American woman in the United States. Printed anonymously by George C. Rand & Avery and likely self-financed, her story of indentured servitude in free-state New Hampshire exposed that slavery's shadows fell even in the North. Then the book vanished for over 100 years until scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr…
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