William Wells Brown
William Wells Brown (1814?-1884) was born a slave named William, the product of a union between a slave and a local landowner in Missouri. He escaped in 1834 and adopted the name of a local Quaker man, Wells Brown, who helped him gain his freedom. He worked for several years as both a steamboatman and conductor of the Underground Railroad. After he moved to New York, Brown alerted slaves to possible freedom whenever they traveled North with their masters. He would take them aside and tell them that because New York was a free state they were also free.
Brown educated himself and began giving lectures on abolition and traveling throughout the North. He moved to England when the American Fugitive Slave Law was passed in 1850 to avoid reinslavement. Brown's friends raised enough money by 1854 to purchase his freedom and he returned to the United States. Brown was the first African-American to publish a novel, a play, a military study of his people, and a study of black sociology.
Brown published an autobiography, the "Narrative of William W. Brown; a fugitive slave" (1847), after the success of Frederick Douglass' popular narrative. "Three Years in Europe" (1852) was expanded into the "The American Fugitive in Europe" (1855). He published a play, "Escape; or A Leap for Freedom" (1858) , a comic melodrama about two slave who marry and a number of non-fiction pieces: "The Black Man" (1863), "This Rising Son" (1873) and "My Southern Home" (1880).
Brown's novel "Clotel" was published in four different versions, with heavy revisions to each: "Clotel; or the President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States" (1853), "Miralda, or The Beautiful Quadroon: A Romance of American Slavery Founded on Fact" (1860) "Clotelle: A Tale of the Southern States" (1864), and "Clotelle; or the Colored Heroine. A Tale of the Southern States" (1867).
The 1853 edition was only published in London and is now the most popular. The heroine, Clotel, was presented as the daughter of President Thomas Jefferson and his slave Currer. (Jefferson was widely rumored to have several slave daughters.) Later (American) editions feature Clotel as the daughter of a Southern Senator.
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Can you tell me when and in what publication William Wells Brown published an essay entitled "On Race and Change"?
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This book should be required reading in highschool.It brings out the whole issue of slavery and it's total affect on the class structure and power struggle which exist
in the black community today.Also the hipocracy of racial
purity ,America on the whole is a mixed race country most so called whites have some Black or Native American dna
THE JASMAN
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this man has inspired me... yes i am a white man but i beleive everyone is the same...nomatter if the are rich poor black or white...
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i beleive everthing that william Wells Brown stated i his story he is an inspeation to us all.....i also believe that should be have to read this in school because it will give them a bette perspective on what slavery is really all about....
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I don't have any facts about William Wells Brown, but my 13-year-old son was given an assignment at school to write a short story about him, so I went to project gutenberg and started reading Brown's autobiography. I was absolutely stunned by how powerful the writing was, how exciting, real, gripping, and fascinating. I'm 52 years old and it sort of shocks me I've never heard of him before. What an incredible writer!
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