Phillis Wheatley became the first Black woman poet to be published in American history.

Born in West Africa and enslaved as a child. Wheatley taught herself to read and write in English, Latin, and Greek. Something most people believed Black people were incapable of at the time.

Her book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, was so groundbreaking. That white leaders forced her to prove she actually wrote it. A panel of powerful men — including politicians and clergy — interrogated her before allowing the book to be published.

She passed their test.

Her success challenged the lie that Black people were intellectually inferior and helped lay the foundation for Black literature. Black journalism and Black intellectual thought in America.

Without Phillis Wheatley. There is no tradition leading to writers like Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, or Maya Angelou.

She wasn’t just a poet — She was proof.