Harriet Jacobs

(1813 - 1897)

For refusing her enslaver’s sexual advances, Harriet Jacobs in 1835 was sent from his house to his plantation. She soon ran away, finding refuge in the attic of her free grandmother, where she remained for seven years. Reaching the North in 1842, Jacobs eventually found work in the antislavery reading room above Frederick Douglass’ newspaper, The North Star, in Rochester, New York. She is the author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.