Emory’s Rose Library highlights Black poet writing at eve of independence

As the nation spends this year marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, signed by the U.S. Founding Fathers, N’Kosi Oates is reflecting on someone he calls a “Founding Mother”: Phillis Wheatley Peters.

Wheatley Peters, the first African American published poet, “was very much a part of the nation’s ideas and debates that shaped the revolutionary era,” says Oates, curator of African American collections at Emory’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library.

Oates points to Wheatley Peters’ poem “His Excellency General Washington,” which George Washington praised. Washington even invited her to visit him at his Continental Army headquarters. 

Wheatley Peters is believed to have been born in present-day Senegal before being enslaved and taken to the American colonies at age seven or eight. 

The Wheatley family of Boston purchased Phillis Wheatley to work as enslaved domestic labor and taught her to read and write. Recognizing her prodigious talents as a scholar, they encouraged her studies and her poetry and showed her off to family and friends within their elite social circles. After she was freed later in life, she married John Peters and took her husband’s last name.

Because of her race, no American press would publish Wheatley Peters’ work. A press in London, however, issued her book “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral” in 1773, when she was 20 years old. The Rose Library collections include a copy of the book, autographed by Wheatley Peters, and a London newspaper featuring an advertisement for it.

Two of Wheatley Peters’ “copybooks” — notebooks schoolchildren used to practice penmanship — also reside at the Rose Library. They contain drafts of her original verse, including the poem “The Voice of Freedom,” as well as poems authored by others, such as William Shakespeare and John Dryden. 

“In her work, we see striking parallels between enslaved people’s longing for freedom and the American Colonies’ quest for independence,” says Oates. 

The first and last lines of “The Voice of Freedom” underscore those parallels:

Americans attend to Freedom’s cry!

Who scorns her voice deserves in chains to die … 

Base slaves you’ll live, like malefactors die!

“Wheatley Peters’ fight for her own abolition and that of other people really was rooted in her ideas about humanity and a deep belief in the ideals of the revolutionary era,” says Michelle Gordon, associate teaching professor and director of undergraduate studies in Emory’s Department of African American Studies. 

“The world doesn’t have a lot of other documents that help us get at what a teenage African girl living at that time thought about the ideals of the revolution and her place in it,” she says.

Gordon takes students in her classes “Survey of African American Literature Before 1900” and “Slavery in U.S. History and Culture” to visit the collection so that they can leaf through Wheatley Peters’ work themselves.

“They are able to identify and trace the influences and trajectory of so-called ‘radical’ ideas like democracy and freedom, and questions of to whom they should apply,” Gordon says. 

These questions “remain unresolved” in public discourse 250 years later, she adds. 

“It’s truly remarkable when classes visit,” says Oates, “because students and faculty can literally hold in their hands documents that predate the Declaration of Independence.” 

Students begin to see Wheatley Peters as more than “a set of facts to learn or a few lines of poetry that get recited,” says Gordon. “She becomes a whole person, a young person like themselves, who is taking in the world and really, literally, taking note of what inspires her.” 

Wheatley Peters’ materials established what would become the Rose Library’s extensive African American History and Culture collections when Randall Burkett, the first curator of these collections, acquired them in 1997. Burkett retired in 2018.

Today, the Rose Library houses one of the largest assemblages of African American materials in the United States, and the largest in the Southeast.

And it all began with Wheatley Peters, whom Oates calls a foundational voice in American poetry and African American thought.