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When artist Athena Scott got a job with Mural Arts Philadelphia to design a mural in honor of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, she had never heard of the 19th-century suffragist and abolitionist.
Scott relied heavily on the resources of the Penn State University’s Center for Black Digital Research, where she learned Harper was the first Black woman to tour the country as a paid anti-slavery speaker. Harper chastised the racism of white women fighting for voting rights, and was one of the first Black women to publish a novel, “Iola Leroy” (1892).
“All these things in this one woman,” Scott said. “She made such an impact in everything that she touched.”
Risë Wilson, founder of the Laundromat Project and Greene Street Friends School Alum, is pictured as a young girl along with the names of other Black women artists and activists on the school as part of the We Are All Bound Up Together mural on the school in Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood. (Kimberly Paynter/WHYY)
Scott placed Harper in the center of the mural on the Greene Street Friends School building at Armat and Greene streets in Germantown. But she is not alone.
Surrounding Harper are portraits of other prominent Black women of the same era: Nannie Helen Burroughs, who started a school for Black girls in Washington, D.C.; Mary Ann Shadd Cary, the first Black woman to publish a newspaper; Harriet Forten Purvis, founder of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society; and her niece Charlotte Forten Grimké, a teacher who educated formerly enslaved people newly freed after the Civil War.
Mural artist Athena Scott designed the We Are All Bound Up Together mural on the wall of the Greene Street Friends School in Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood. (Kimberly Paynter/WHYY)
“She is part of a collective of Black women,” said Gabrielle Foreman, co-founder and co-director of the Center for Black Digital Research, of Harper.
“These are women from Philadelphia who were holding down that activist, organizational and democratic commitment to making this country what it can be at a moment where it had not yet gotten there,” she said.
This year is the bicentennial of Harper’s birth. To mark the anniversary the Center for Black Digital Studies worked with the staff of Greene Street Friends to devise a teaching curriculum about Harper and the activist work she was involved in.
Reenactor Sharia Benn teaches 2nd grade Greene Street Friends School students about abolitionists and activist Francis Harper at the We Are All Bound Up Together mural event on October 30, 2025. (Kimberly Paynter/WHYY)
One of the phrases for which Harper is most recognized comes from a speech she gave at the National Women’s Rights Convention in 1866, in which she exclaimed the urgent need for the right to vote, while also warning that Black women need more than suffrage to live freely and equally.
“We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity,” Harper said in her convention speech. “Society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving a curse in its own soul.”
The excerpt is included on the outdoor mural.
“She is committing to reconciliation, to love, to leading with empathy as a core of democracy,” Foreman said. “Why do we not know her name like Sojourner Truth? How do we not know her name like Harriet Tubman?”
