The Agler Freedom House

"But I feel now that the time has come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak."
- Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1851

Image: Detail from reproduction of portrait of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Original by Alanson Fisher (1807–1884), Oil on canvas, 1853. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
Text: Excerpt from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s March 1851 letter to Gamaliel Bailey, editor of the National Era abolitionist newspaper in Washington, DC, initiating what would become the serialized novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Newly relocated with her family to Brunswick, Maine, Beecher Stowe had been acquainted with Bailey in Cincinnati while he worked with James Birney at the Philanthropist paper.

Spring has sprung

What became known as Bloody Sunday occurred in 1965 in Selma, Alabama. The march was named for the 600 marchers who were attacked while crossing Edmund Pettus bridge. Law enforcement officers attacked unarmed marchers with billy clubs and sprayed tear gas.

Activist Amelia Boynton Robinson was brutally beaten by Alabama state troopers during the march. This photo drew national attention to the cause of civil rights and captured the brutality of the African American voting rights struggle.

Robinson was a leading organizer of the march, working directly with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Robinson had a history of activism, co-founding the Dallas County Voters League in 1933, and held African American voter registration drives in Selma from the 1930s-1950s.

Later that year, the Voting Rights Act passed, a landmark federal achievement of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement.

📸 Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, © 1965 Spider Martin.

The Margaret Agler House 1841