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After Frederick Douglass, no other formerly enslaved person than William Wells Brown had so skillfully contested racial slavery in the United States and the anti-Black prejudices underlying and outlasting its existence. Born into slavery in Lexington, Kentucky, Brown escaped captivity and eventually settled in Boston, the northern epicenter of organized abolitionism. He emerged as a prominent reformer and race leader whose printed essays, speeches, and correspondence reinforced an overarching quest to advance African Americans individually and collectively throughout the Civil War era. As a lifelong memoirist, he probed the story of himself in creative and no less challenging ways. And, as a published novelist, playwright, and travel writer, Brown achieved pathbreaking firsts for a person of color in the United States.

Historian Raymond Krohn surveys Brown's remarkable activism and extraordinary career. He situates Brown's career within prevailing antiabolitionist and anti-Black contexts, thereby affording readers a unique opportunity to follow his lifelong quest on behalf of racial advancement. He will especially consider the political, social, cultural, and intellectual environments that Brown had worked in and against.