Description

Harriet Jacobs — Bearing Witness

This educational poster centers the voice of Harriet Jacobs, author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), one of the most important firsthand testimonies of enslavement in American history. Writing under the name Linda Brent, Jacobs exposed the daily violence, sexual coercion, and legal abandonment faced by enslaved Black women—realities often erased from official records.

Her words are not metaphor. They are evidence. Jacobs documented a system in which there was no law to protect the enslaved, where survival required resistance, concealment, and extraordinary endurance. This poster preserves her testimony as historical record and moral instruction, inviting students to confront slavery not as abstraction, but as lived experience.

This is not a story told about her. It is a story told by her. And it remains essential to understanding American history.