Harriet Jacobs

This is a three-quarter-length portrait of Harriet Jacobs whose autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), became an influential abolitionist text. Born enslaved in North Carolina, Jacobs self-emancipated by fleeing to the north, where she became an activist. During the Civil War, she and her daughter helped organize a school in Alexandria and other relief efforts for those who had fled enslavement.