"Frances Ann Rollin (1845-October 17,1901)Though

She kept a diary in 1868,making it the earliest known diary by a southern woman.Frances was born in South Carolina into a free family of color originally from the island of Saint Domingue.Her father William M.Rollin was a successful  in Charleston.During the Civil War,Frances attended The Quaker School for Colored Youth in Philadelphia where she began her career as a writer and a proponent of Civil Rights and feminism.In 1865,Frances returned to Charleston as a teacher for the Freedmen's Bureau.Illegal refused first class on the ferry to Beaufort,that year,Frances won a lawsuit against the captain of the ferry, Pilot Boy.She was aided in her suit by Major Martin Delany,then the highest ranking black officer in the Union Army.Martin was so impressed by Frances that he commissioned her to write his biography.Frances traveled to Boston to write and to seek a publisher.Her account describes her writing experience as well as her meetings with notable abolitionists and luminaries of the Civil War era notes Frances financial challenges once the Civil War ended.In the summer of 1868 Life and Public Services of Martin R.Delany was published by Lee and Shepard,a Boston publisher.Frances,employing the affectionate nickname used by friends and family.wrote under the pen name Frank A.Rollin.Returning to South Carolina in 1868,she was employed by a Pennsylvania-born black attorney,William J.Whipper,who had been recently elected to the South Carolina Legislature.Despite family objections,Frances and William married a few months later.She continued her diary during their brief courtship and first year of marriage.The diary allowed a rare glimpse into the social life of Columbia, the South Carolina capital,and recorded the anti-black,anti-Republican violence the ongoing in the state during Reconstruction.Marital and political difficulties took their toll on the Whippers over the next 12 years.By 1880 the dream of a Reconstructed South with equal opportunities for blacks was over the Ku Klux Klan was over.Frances separated from her husband and took their children,Ionia,Leigh,and Winifred to Washington,D.C. when old friend Frederick Douglass,Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia,offered her a position.Frances saw the children through college and lived to see Winifred become a teacher,Leigh begin his career as an actor,and Ionia attend Howard Medical School.Though seperated from William,Frances continued to support the political causes they both favored.In 1892 she contracted an illness while campaigning for Republican presidential Candidate James C. Blaine from which she never recovered.She died in Beafort South Carolina.