William Wells Brown, Sept. 26, 1854

I would first like to thank the 100+ people who came to help launch Protesting with Rosa Parks out into the world from the village of Florence, the former home of David Ruggles, Sojourner Truth, and Basil Dorsey. It was a great success.

The main purpose of today’s post, however, is to remember William Wells Brown’s comments on returning to this country on this date in 1854. In 1833, at the age of eighteen, after a failed attempt to escape with his mother, she was sold to New Orleans and William was sold to a steamboat owner. He then seized an opportunity to walk away to freedom in Cincinnati in January 1834. He married, moved to Buffalo and then to Boston, where he became an antislavery lecturer and in 1847 published a personal narrative second in popularity only to that of Frederick Douglass. With his life and freedom at risk, Brown sailed to Europe in 1849 and settled in Britain as an antislavery lecturer. In 1854 friends purchased his freedom, and he set sail for the States.

After a twenty-day passage aboard the steamer City of Manchester, Brown reached U.S. soil on the afternoon of September 26, 1854. The following year he concluded his travel narrative, The American Fugitive in Europe: Sketches of Places and People Abroad, with a description of his experience of “the influence of slavery” on the streets of Philadelphia on the very day he returned, contrasting his exclusion from a Philadelphia omnibus with the respect he had been accorded in France, England, and Scotland, characterizing the “Colorphobia” in Philadelphia as even “more rampant than in the pro-slavery, negro-hating city of New York.” He ends this comparison—and the book—with a condemnation of the forces that generated racial prejudice in the United States:

“While walking through Chestnut-street, in company with two of my fellow-passengers, we hailed an omnibus going in the direction which we wished to go. It immediately stopped, and the white men were furnished with seats, but I was told that “We don’t allow niggers to ride in here.” It so happened that these two persons had rode in the same car with me from London to Liverpool. We had put up at the same hotel in the latter place, and had crossed the Atlantic in the same steamer. But as soon as we touch the soil of America we can no longer ride in the same conveyance, no longer eat at the same table, or be regarded with equal justice, by our thin-skinned democracy. During five years’ residence in monarchical Europe I had enjoyed the rights allowed to all foreigners in the countries through which I passed; but on returning to my native land the influence of slavery meets me the first day I am in the country. . . . I had partaken of the hospitality of noblemen in England, had sat at the table of the French Minister of Foreign Affairs; I had looked from the strangers’ gallery down upon the great legislators of England, as they sat in the House of Commons; I had stood in the House of Lords, when Her Britannic Majesty prorogued her Parliament; I had eaten at the same table with Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, Charles Dickens, Eliza Cook, Alfred Tennyson, and the son-in-law of Sir Walter Scott; the omnibuses of Paris, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Liverpool, had stopped to take me up; I had often entered the “Caledonia,” “Bayswater,” “Hammersmith,” “Chelsea,” “Bluebell,” and other omnibuses that rattle over the pavements of Regent-street, Cheapside, and the west end of London,—but what mattered that? My face was not white, my hair was not straight; and therefore I must be excluded from a seat in a third-rate American omnibus. Slavery demanded that it should be so. I charge this prejudice to the pro-slavery pulpits of our land, which first set the example of proscription by erecting the “negro pew.” I charge it to that hypocritical profession of democracy which will welcome fugitives from other countries, and drive its own into exile. I charge it to the recreant sons of the men who carried on the American revolutionary war, and who come together every fourth of July to boast of what their fathers did, while they, their sons, have become associated with bloodhounds, to be put at any moment on the track of the fugitive slave.”

William Wells Brown went on to become one of the great African American writers, the first to write a travel narrative and a novel, as well as two plays and a number of important works on African American history.