Credit: Quintard Taylor. The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle’s Central District from1870 through the Civil Rights Era.
Recognizing the destructive force of alcoholism in African-American communities throughout the United States, Frances Harper served as vice-president at the Women’s International Temperance Conference in Philadelphia in 1876 and became the first Superintendent of the Negro Section of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in 1888. Harper then campaigned against the segregation of the organization and served as the only African American on the WCTU’s national board until 1893. In 1891, a temperance group in Seattle named their branch the Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Branch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in her honor.
