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Phillis Wheatley born.
orn in West Africa, she was sold into slavery at the age of seven or eight and transported to North America. She was purchased by the Wheatley family of Boston, who taught her to read and write and encouraged her poetry when they saw her talent. -
Phillis Wheatley's book of poems
Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, was published in Boston and then in England, making her the first published African American writer, and the second book by a woman to be published in the land which was about to become the United States. -
Phillis Wheatley died
The racism and sexism that marked the era had forced her into a kind of domestic labor that she had not been accustomed to, even before becoming a free person. Wheatley died on December 5, 1784, at the age of 31. Her infant son died three and a half hours after her death. -
Sarah Moore Grimke born
Sarah Moore Grimké was an American abolitionist, writer, and member of the women's suffrage movement. Born and reared in South Carolina to a prominent, wealthy planter family, she moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the 1820s where she became a Quaker. -
Lucretia Mott born
Lucretia Coffin was born in Nantucket, Massachusetts, the second child Anna Folger and Thomas Coffin. -
Amistad revolted
53 African slaves on board the slave ship the Amistad revolted against their captors, killing all but the ship's navigator, who sailed them to Long Island, N.Y., instead of their intended destination, Africa. Joseph Cinqué was the group's leader. The slaves aboard the ship became unwitting symbols for the antislavery movement in pre-Civil War United States. -
Emancipation Proclamation
President Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring "that all persons held as slaves" within the Confederate states "are, and henceforward shall be free." -
Fourteenth Amendment
Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution is ratified, defining citizenship. Individuals born or naturalized in the United States are American citizens, including those born as slaves. This nullifies the Dred Scott Case (1857), which had ruled that blacks were not citizens. -
Spelman College
The Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary was established in the basement of Friendship Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, by two teachers from the Oread Institute of Worcester, Massachusetts: Harriet E. Giles and Sophia B. Packard.Giles and Packard had met while Giles was a student, and Packard the preceptress, of the New Salem Academy in New Salem, Massachusetts, and fostered a lifelong friendship there. -
Sojourner Truth (Isabella Van Wagener) born
Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, Ulster County, New York, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826. -
Women's suffrage
Women's suffrage (also known as female suffrage, woman suffrage or women's right to vote) is the right of women to vote in elections. Limited voting rights were gained by women in Finland, Iceland, Sweden and some Australian colonies and western U.S. states in the late 19th century. -
Lucy Terry's "Bars Fight"
Lucy Terry work "Bars Fight" is a ballad about an attack upon two white families by Native Americans on August 25, 1746. The attack occurred in an area of Deerfield called "The Bars", which was a colonial term for a meadow. The poem was preserved orally until it was finally published in 1855 in Josiah Gilbert Holland's History of Western Massachusetts. This poem is the only known work by Terry.
