Historical research is a sort of magic that reveals what was hidden—places, people, events. But how does that history get lost in the first place? As the time between then and now extends, some topics and events are overlooked or under-reported. That’s certainly the case for writer Lucretia Howe Newman Coleman. In her time, Coleman was a notable figure, but, as literary scholar Jennifer Harris writes, even though she was well-represented in histories of Black women writers written she was alive, “Coleman has, for the most part, been absent from broader contemporary considerations of late-nineteenth-century African American women’s literature."
Coleman was born in the mid-1850s in Dresden, a Canadian town in southwest Ontario. Dresden was an Underground Railroad terminus and home of the Dawn Settlement. According to its founder, Josiah Henson, the Dawn Settlement was populated by free and formerly enslaved Black people with the goal of showing “that the Negro, given a fair chance and a square deal, could measure up to the standards of the white man, both in self-support and mental development.”
Coleman’s father, William P. Newman, was a minister and Oberlin graduate who had come to the Dawn Settlement from Virginia in 1843, writes Harris. The family briefly moved back to the United States when he became pastor of Baker Street Baptist Church in Cincinnati. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, they returned to Canada where Newman became editor of an abolitionist newspaper. Her father’s work was likely a huge influence on Coleman’s own writing career. As Harris explains, she
would have had early exposure to the daily operations of newspapers and publishing. Even if she was not directly involved in the paper’s production, she would have been privy to conversations about the business of producing a paper and its purpose and potential in advancing [B]lack causes.
However, by 1866, Coleman had lost both of her parents. This left her with an inheritance, and it meant another move. This time, along with her stepmother and siblings, she moved to Appleton, Wisconsin, where she and her stepsister were the first Black students to attend Lawrence University, though Coleman didn’t graduate. Instead, she took up a series of jobs, including teaching at a Black school in Frankfort, Kentucky, and working as assistant secretary and bookkeeper for a church in Nashville.