Octavia V. Rogers Albert

Who was Octavia V. Rogers Albert?

Octavia V. Rogers Albert was an African American author. She documented slavery in the United States. She was born Octavia Victoria Rogers in Oglethorpe, Georgia, where she lived in slavery until the Emancipation. She attended Atlanta University where she studied to be a teacher.

Unlike many others, Octavia Rogers saw teaching as a form of worship and Christian service. She received her first teaching job in Montezuma, Georgia. In 1874, at around twenty-one years old, she married another teacher, A.E.P. Albert, who later became an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Not too long after the two married they relocated to Houma, Louisiana. Here Octavia began conducting interviews with men and women who were once enslaved. These interviews were the raw material for her collection of narratives, The House of Bondage, or Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves, published in 1890. Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert died before The House of Bondage became widely known.