William Wells Brown: Black Abolitionist in Famine Ireland

 

Professor Christine Kinealy (Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute, Quinnipiac University, African American Irish Diaspora Network) explores Brown’s little-known visit to Dublin in August 1849. As a “self-emancipated slave”, he delivered an Abolitionist lecture only days after Queen Victoria – later denigrated as the “Famine Queen” – had embarked on her own tour of the hunger-stricken country. Lenwood “Leni” Sloan (African American Irish Diaspora Network) reprises Wells Brown’s most evocative utterances while he was in Ireland and afterward. Although he was only in Ireland for a relatively short period, William Wells Brown found his visit – like Frederick Douglass before him – foundational and transformative for his development as an Abolitionist and activist abroad. 

 

William Wells Brown was a self-emancipated slave born in Kentucky around 1814, who followed in the footsteps of his better-known friend and fellow anti-slavery campaigner Frederick Douglass to Dublin – a center of the anti-slavery movement – during the latter years of the Great Hunger. Like Douglass, he published his Narrative of William Wells Brown, A Fugitive Slave in 1847 which he sought to promote in Ireland.