William Wells Brown

William Wells Brown was born into slavery near Lexington, Kentucky, in 1814, the son of an enslaved woman named Elizabeth and a white planter, George W. Higgins, a relative of the man who held him in bondage. In his youth he was hired out to many masters, laboring on Mississippi River steamboats and, for a time, being forced to assist a slave trader marching coffles of the enslaved to the auctions of the Deep South — an ordeal that seared into him the cruelty of the system he would spend his life fighting.

After an unsuccessful 1833 attempt to flee with his mother, Brown escaped alone on New Year's Day, 1834, slipping away from a steamboat at Cincinnati. A Quaker named Wells Brown sheltered and fed him along the way, and in gratitude the young freedman took the man's name as his own. Settling first in Ohio and then in the Boston area, he became a conductor on the Underground Railroad and a celebrated lecturer for the antislavery cause.

Brown then broke ground with his pen as few others of his century did. His 1847 Narrative sold widely; in 1853 he published Clotel; or, The President's Daughter, regarded as the first novel by an African American, and in 1858 The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom, the first published African American play. He also wrote the first Black travelogue of Europe and pioneering histories of Black military service, and in later life practiced medicine.

He died in Chelsea, Massachusetts, in 1884, a self-liberated man who turned his own suffering into literature that opened doors for generations of Black writers who followed. We honor him as a founder whose voice, once forbidden a page, became a beginning for many.