author

Frank A. Rollin

d. 1901

A trailblazing nineteenth-century writer and activist, she published under the name Frank A. Rollin and helped make literary history with a landmark biography of Martin R. Delany. Her life also reached into teaching, civil rights work, and Reconstruction-era politics in South Carolina.

1 Audiobook

Life and public services of Martin R. Delany Sub-Assistant Commissioner Bureau Relief of Refugees, Freedmen, and of Abandoned Lands, and late Major 104th U.S. Colored Troops

Life and public services of Martin R. Delany Sub-Assistant Commissioner Bureau Relief of Refugees, Freedmen, and of Abandoned Lands, and late Major 104th U.S. Colored Troops

by Frank A. Rollin

About the author

Born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1845, Frances Anne Rollin Whipper grew up in a free Black family and was educated in Philadelphia. She later became a teacher and an activist, and she was closely connected to the political world of Reconstruction through her family and her own public work.

Writing as Frank A. Rollin, she is best known for Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany (1868). The book is widely recognized as the first full-length biography published by an African American, making her an important early voice in Black literary history.

Rollin Whipper's legacy reaches beyond one book. She has also been noted for keeping an 1868 diary considered the earliest known diary by a southern Black woman, and her life reflects the energy, ambition, and civic engagement of Black intellectual life in the years after the Civil War. She died on October 17, 1901.