Harriet Forten Purvis Extended Biography
Harriet Forten PurvisExtended BiographyYou may wish to share this biography with students, or just to read it for your own information.Harriet Forten Purvis (born Harriet Davy Forten), was born in 1810 and grew up within the thriving, if small, middle-class Philadelphia African-American community. Her parents were of mixed heritage, and were both respected members of the business community and leading abolitionists. They had four daughters – Sarah, Margaretta, Mary Isabella, and Harriett – as well as three sons. They educated all of their children in classical education as well as refined manners. It was this education, and the support of their family, that helped Harriet and her sisters to move beyond the roles allowed to women in 19th century American society.As Harriet grew older, she became very interested in literature. However, her greatest interest was abolitionism. With her sisters, her mother, and the activist Lucretia Mott she co-founded the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, the country’s first multiracial abolitionist organization. In 1831, she married Robert Purvis, an important abolitionist from South Carolina. He supported her abolitionist efforts. In 1838, she helped to host the Women’s Anti-Slavery Society meeting in Pennsylvania Hall, Philadelphia. A pro-slavery mob threw stones at the building and later set the hall on fire to stop the meeting, but the convention merely relocated to a nearby school. Harriett continued to attend the meetings in the years that followed, but she also helped to pioneer other activist strategies. Beginning in the 1830s she was a leading proponent of the Free Produce Society, which called for a boycott of any products grown by enslaved labor. With her husband, she also operated a station in the Underground Railroad, helping African-Americans escape from slavery. They also collected clothing and raised money for fugitives. They assisted about 9000 people.Harriet was especially incensed by segregation in schooling. On January 16, 1856, she wrote to a fellow abolitionist “I have been teaching my little brothers and sister this winter, for there is no school here for them to go, except a Public School, and there they are made to sit by their selves [sic], because their faces are not as white as the rest of the scholars. Oh! Ellie how it makes my blood boil when I think of it.”1During the Civil War, Harriet also helped to organize a protest against the segregation of the Philadelphia trolleys. Like many mothers in Philadelphia, she wanted to visit her son at camp William Penn. However, the trolley drivers insisted that African-Americans could only ride on the outside of the trolley. In protest, she tried to take a seat inside, but eventually had to leave the trolley. However, the protest was ultimately successful and drivers were ordered to allow all riders to sit where they pleased.Following the Civil War, Harriett also became an important member of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association, working to win the vote for women. The campaign had mixed results. Ultimately, women got the vote, but African-American women were in reality often restricted from voting by Jim Crow laws. Harriet Forten Purvis died on June 11, 1875 from tuberculosis.1 Helen “Hattie” Forten Purvis to Ellen Garrison, January 16, 1856.