Frances Rollin Whipper

Frances Anne Rollin Whipper was a political activist, teacher, and author. Whipper and her four sisters were socially and politically active within the South Carolina state government during the Reconstruction era. In 1867, she won one of the earliest Civil Rights lawsuits for being denied first class passage on a steamship traveling between Beaufort and Charleston, South Carolina. Whipper wrote and published the biography of the abolitionist, nationalist, and highest ranking Black commissioned officer in the Union army, Martin R. Delany (1812-1885). Published under the name Frank A. Rollin in 1868, The Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany, was the first full-length biography written by an African American. Whipper's 1868 diary, one of the earliest known diaries by a southern Black woman, details her social and intellectual activities in Boston, as well as her courtship and early months of marriage to William James Whipper, a member of the South Carolina legislature and proponent of women's suffrage.