Jennie Carter
Her work covered diverse topics, including slavery, racism, women's suffrage, temperance, politics, and immigration, and was widely circulated in late 19th century black communities throughout the American West and nationwide.
In her essays in The Elevator, she describes a middle-class childhood in which she loved to read and was "passionately fond of music," not assuming "a young lady's position in society until I was somewhat prepared by years.
Carter later wrote in The Elevator of how bad she had felt because she had hit her sister three weeks before she died, using the incident to advise her younger readers to refrain from anger.
In another incident, a man who escaped slavery came to her doorstep and Carter was able to help raise funds in the local community for him to continue his journey to freedom.
[7] In 1866, she married her second husband, musician and Civil Rights activist Dennis Drummond Carter[8] and began a life with him in a house filled with musical instruments.
Bell, editor of the weekly San Francisco black newspaper The Elevator, offering to write short stories for children to be included in the paper.
Her writing expanding beyond stories for children to commentaries on California and national politics, racism, women's rights and suffrage, morality, education, temperance, and many other issues.
She wrote in a light-hearted way about herself as a "garrulous" old lady and how she managed to "preserve summer in my heart all through my sixty years," by being "not in the least dignified," telling of living a healthy life and skipping rope and playing hide and go seek with the neighbor children.
"Children, you hear a great deal said about color by those around you, see attention given white persons by your friends that is wholly unmerited, while those of darker skin are treated with cool neglect.
In one column, she writes of how her husband was confronted by whites near Harper's Ferry, West Virginia who told him no black person was allowed to travel after 4PM; in response Dennis Carter calmly offered to beat up 'anyone who laid hands on him.
She has an innate purity that shrinks from coarse brutality, obscene jests, horrid oaths, the accompaniments of our election days; and her presence will not restrain men at such times, and women, instead of being the gainer by the contract will be a loser in self respect surely.
"[19][2] Though she didn't believe in women becoming politicians, she did not hold back from voicing her opinions on the politics of the era, specifically divisions between pro-Slavery Democrats and pro-Union Republicans.
Human bondage soon will exist only in history, and religious intolerance be a dream of the past, and mind will constitute manhood, not physical types or color of skin.
How strange that great lessons of truth must be forced upon the mind by error as the contrast, and a startling wrong perpetrated to ensure right, and a long lethargic sleep to produce a full awakening!
"[28] Garder notes that his research into Carter helped uncover little-known black communities in the Sierra Nevadas, which had links to larger urban centers like Sacramento and San Francisco.
Writing like Carter's that was published in black newspapers, along with similar work by Norris Wright Cuney, Frank Webb and George T Ruby, Gardner said, was an important part of the literary output of 19th century African Americans that was often overlooked.
[30] A reenactment video featuring several Jennie Carter essays was filmed at the Doris Foley Historical Library and the Pine Grove Cemetery in Nevada City.
