bookthink - Thanks for the contribution of question 741. Very interesting.
Emmbook - You are correct that it is not Phillis Wheatley. Re: "The correct answer shares a name with a character in a Poe story." Are you referring to the married name and the Prince (Prospero) in the “The Masque of the Red Death”? I wasn't sure if you were giving a hint or the answer!
740. Answer: Lucy Terry (married name Prince) and the poem was “Bars Fight”
"The author of the first known work of African American literature (the poem “Bars Fight”) was Lucy Terry [born about 1730] who was kidnapped in Africa as an infant and sold into slavery in Rhode Island. At the age of five, she became the property of Captain Ebenezer Wells of Deerfield, Massachusetts. Around the age of sixteen Lucy Terry responded to a 1746 Indian ambush of two white families in a section of town known as “the Bars” by composing the ballad poem “Bars Fight,” which earned her local acclaim. People in the area recited the poem through the years until it was finally published in 1855 in Josiah Gilbert Holland's History of Western Massachusetts.
She remained enslaved until 1756, when Obijah Prince, a prosperous free black man, purchased her freedom and married her. They were married by a justice of the peace Ephraim Williams, he was later the founder of Williams College. In 1760 the Princes moved to Guilford, Vermont, where Lucy Terry Prince gained local renown as a storyteller and orator while educating her six [or seven?] children. She delivered a three-hour address to the board of trustees of Williams College in order to gain admittance for her son Festus. While she was not successful, her speech was remembered for its eloquence and skill. Her son, Cesar, fought in the Revolutionary War.
A courageous, eloquent activist, Prince worked hard not only to survive economically but also to protect her family from racist harassment and vandalism. A persuasive orator, Prince successfully negotiated a land case before the Supreme Court of Vermont in the 1790s. She argued against two of the leading lawyers in the state (one of whom later became the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Vermont), and won her case against the false land claims of Colonel Eli Bronson [who was trying to steal her land]. Samuel Chase, the presiding justice of the Court, said that her argument was better than he had heard from any Vermont lawyer.
Lemuel Haynes preached an antislavery sermon at her funeral in which he predicted that despots and racists, “tyrants and oppressors,” would “sink beneath” Terry’s “feet,” a witty reference to her poetry."
Source: Info copied and combined from several sites.
