Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert
Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert (December 24, 1853 – c. 1890) was an African-American author and biographer. She documented slavery in the United States through a collection of interviews with ex-slaves in her book The House of Bondage, or Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves. She was a Black teacher and writer.
Octavia Victoria Rogers was born in Oglethorpe, Georgia, where she lived in slavery until the Emancipation. Like millions of freed blacks, she had a deep yearning for learning and eventually she studied to be a teacher at Atlanta University. This steady young woman was as serious about being a stalwart Christian as she was about being a sterling teacher. While still living in Oglethorpe, she joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which was led by the legendary Bishop Henry McNeal Turner.
Like many of her contemporaries, Rogers saw teaching as a form of worship and Christian service. Her first teaching job was in Montezuma, Georgia. There, in 1874, she married another teacher at this school, A.E.P. Albert, who later became an ordained minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church. Soon after their marriage, the Alberts moved to Houma, Louisiana, where she began conducting interviews with men and women who were once enslaved. These interviews were the raw material for what became her gifted collection of narratives, “The House of Bondage,” or “Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves.” Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert did not live to see “The House of Bondage” reach the public.
It was shortly after her death in 1890 that the New Orleans-based Methodist Episcopal Church newspaper, the “Southwestern Christian Advocate” serialized the work from January to December 1890.
Written by Dianne Washington