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• 1 2021-05-05T15:46:41+00:00 The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements 11 Slight history of William Brown plain 2021-05-13T04:20:51+00:00

  By Dionne Hardy and Naomi
  
  

  By definition a Cabinet of Wonders is something that should invoke questions, astonishment, and at some points awe. We believe that this not only applies to our time period but we also believe it should apply to the time period the object was created in. An object in a Cabinet of Curiosities should make a person question why, no matter when they are viewing it. We chose our object for this reason, along with many others.
  
  We chose a book from the Watkinson Library titled, The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements by William Wells Brown, published in 1863. William Wells Brown was an escaped slave and abolitionist lecturer and is considered to be one of the first African American’s to publish a book. This book is considered one of his greatest pieces of work. It debunks the misinterpretation that black people have to be surrounded by white people in order to succeed. William Wells Brown was born into slavery in 1814 or March of 1815 near Lexington, Kentucky. He was a descendent of Mayflower passenger Stephen Hopkins through his father. His mother was a slave of Native American and black ancestry. She was owned by John Young and she had seven children all by different fathers. Brown’s siblings were Leander, Solomon, Elizabeth, Benjamin, Milford and Joseph.  
  
  To paraphrase information given by the library, the book encompasses short and informative biographies of “noteworthy” African American’s from that period. In the library the page is open to the biography of Reverend James Pennington, a black man who escaped from slavery in 1827 when he was 20 years old and, as described by Brown, was “ignorant of letters”, which we assume to mean unable to read and write effectively. Eight years after his escape he was admitted as an auditor to Yale, back then it was called the Yale Divinity School. Once there he studied and mastered Greek, Latin, and German. Pennington eventually led the Talcott Street Congregational Church from 1840 to 1847.  
  
  Earlier we stated that objects in our Cabinet of Wonders should invoke a sense of astonishment and awe, but should also make the viewer ask questions such as why. Upon first viewing this book in its display case one of the first questions we asked was why. Why would someone like William Wells Brown take the time to publish a book about noteable African American’s in the 1800s? Someone may consider now, looking back on what happened during that time, that publishing a book wouldn’t help very much in the grand scheme of things. Racism still ran ramped in America and still would no matter what was published.  
  
  But the point was not drastically changing society, it was simply bringing awareness. Not just about the fact that there were successful intellectual black people in the world, but that there could be. A common assumption during that time period was that black people were nothing without the aid of white people. That they needed the help of “white saviors” in order to become accomplished and civilized. Brown took the power of his literary voice, and disproved that assumption with sheer fact. Was Brown able to stop all racism with a single novel? No of course not, but the book brought awareness in place of ignorance to those who read it, which was definitely a step in the right direction. His very existence itself was a sign of hope for all black people, free or enslaved. He himself was a well-educated black man publishing books and making speeches, something that black people were not supposed to be capable of doing. The idea of black people being inferior, uneducated and unsuccessful without white people is still prevalent in the present day.