Lawrence Ferlinghetti—We Thought He Might Go on Forever Ferlinghetti

Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights Bookstore in North Beach.

Note—Word came yesterday that Lawrence Ferlinghetti died on Monday in the apartment over City Lights Book Store where he lived for decades.  He was just a month shy of his 102 birthday.  Somehow it seemed to many of us that he might just go on forever like a Lord of the Rings wizard.  He was active in the management of the book store until just a few years ago and sometimes made it downstairs on a good day even later.  And he continued to write including cutting piece on Donald Trump that went viral.  His death was announced by the bookstore which recently was threatened with closing until donors flooded a GoFundMe campaign with donations to keep the beloved institution alive.  The shop’s statement pledged to continue the master’s work and legacy.  The following was posted here in 2019 on his 100th birthday.

Ferlinghetti from the window of his apartment over the store.

Born on March 24, 1919 Lawrence Ferlinghetti celebrates his 100th birthday today, still active and apparently in reasonably good health.  Can’t keep a good poet down.  And for my money Ferlinghetti is the super-nova in the constellation of Beat poets even including other bright spots like Alan Ginsberg, Kenneth Rexroth, and Gary Snyder—all of whom he befriended and published.

The poet was born in Yonkers, New York.  His father was an Italian immigrant auctioneer who had shortened the family name to Ferlin.  Young Larry did not know his real family name until he entered the Navy in 1942.  His mother was of mixed French, Portuguese, and Sephardic Jewish extraction.  He only began using the original family name for his published work in 1955 when his first published collection, Pictures of the Gone World was published.

His father died before he was born and his mother when he was at an early age.  He was raised largely by a French aunt Emily who took her charge with her to France while she worked as a governess there for several years.  French became his first language.

Upon returning to the United States he was placed for a time in a Chappaqua, New York orphanage until his aunt could find a new position.  She was hired as governess to the daughter of Presley Eugene Bisland and Anna Lawrence Brisland, in Bronxville, New York.  Anna was the cultured daughter of the founder of Sarah Lawrence Academy.  The couple took a shine to the bright boy and eventually became virtual parents to him.  He stayed on their estate after Emily left.

The Bislands paid for his tuition at smart day and prep schools and at the University of North Carolina where the young man became interested in journalism and wrote for the college paper.

While on summer vacation in 1940 he and two classmates lived on an island off the coast of Maine making a living lobstering, fishing, and beach combing.  The experience cemented a lifelong love of the sea and the seacoast.

 

                                    Ferlinghetti in the Navy as Captain of a sub chaser off the coast of Normandy.

When World War II broke out, Larry naturally enlisted in the Navy and was educated as a Midshipman and first shipped out as a very junior officer on J.P. Morgan’s former yacht which had been fitted out for anti-submarine patrol along the East Coast when those waters were among the most dangerous in the world.  He advanced and later served on three larger anti-sub ships.  He was Captain of the sub chaser USS SC1308 which served in the fleet protecting the Normandy invasion.  Later he transferred to the Pacific where he was navigator on a troop ship.

After his ship moored in Japan and transferred its troops to occupation duty, the young officer took time to visit devastated Nagasaki.  He was shocked, even traumatized by what he saw only weeks after the atomic bomb was dropped on the civilian population.  He became a lifelong, committed pacifist.

After the war he enrolled in graduate school at Columbia University in New York City with the help of the GI Bill.  He read widely and deeply in the classics of English literature and was influenced by American poets like Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Marianne Moore, and E. E. Cummings.  He also devoured American novelists Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos.  He was searching for an authentically American, democratic voice.  Instructors at Columbia included a who’s who of the New York literati—Babette, Deutsch, Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun, and Mark Van Doren.  He earned his master’s degree in 1947.

Then it was off for further study at the Sorbonne in Paris.  He lived and studied in the City of Lights until getting his doctorate with honors in 1951.  One of his two main theses was on the city as symbolism in poetry, another recurring theme in future work.

 In 1953 Ferlinghetti and his wife, Selden Kirby-Smith who he had married after returning to the States from France, settled in San Francisco.  He taught and tutored French and spent most of his time painting and free lancing as an art critic.  His first foray into poetry was as a translator of work in French published by Peter Martin in his City Lights magazine.  It was the beginning of a close collaboration that really blossomed when the two men joined forces to open City Lights Bookstore in the heart of the bohemian North Beach area.  It was the first all-paperback bookstore in the U.S. and specialized in poetry, literary fiction, and a good supply of the latest European literature.

                        Ferlinghetti's first poetry collection  Number One in City Light Books Pocket Poetry series.

Martin opted out of the partnership in 1955 and Ferlinghetti expanded operations by launch its own publishing house.  The first volume in what would become the famous Pocket Poet series was Pictures of the Gone World.  It would be followed by volumes by Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levitov, William Carlos Williams, and Gregory Corso.

City Lights was never intended to be exclusively a Beat imprint—it issued work by  a number of European writers and Williams who represented an avante garde of an earlier era—but it became the most important publisher of the movement.  He also published prose by Charles Bukowski, Neil Cassady and others and leftist essays by Noam Chomsky, Tom Hayden, and Howard Zinn.  Under Ferlinghetti’s still active supervision, it continues to be an important source of culturally cutting edge work.

Ferlinghetti first heard New York based Alan Ginsburg read Howl at the famous Six Gallery Reading in October 1956 which was the formal introduction of the Beat movement to the San Francisco arts community.  The next day Ferlinghetti sent Ginsburg a wire that began, “I greet you at the beginning of an illustrious career.”  Howl became the fourth volume in the Pocket Poet series.  It also became a famous cause célèbre.

Ferlinghetti proudly and defiantly displaying copies of Alan Ginsberg's Howl.  His obscenity trial for publishing and selling the book became a key case in ending censorship in literature.

Ferlinghetti and his book store manager were arrested by San Francisco police and charged with obscenity for publishing and selling the book.  The case against the manager was dropped, but the city vigorously went after the publisher.  It was a long trial and Ferlinghetti was represented by an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer.  Major literary and academic figures testified about the artistic merit of the book.  In the end judge Clayton Horn acquitted Ferlinghetti and ruled that Howl had significant artistic merit.  It was one of the cases that finally broke the back of censorship of literature.

The book that cemented Ferlinghetti’s own reputation as a poet was not published by City Lights.   A Coney Island of the Mind was issued by New Directions, a prestigious New York publisher in 1958.   It was both a critical and a popular success.  In a country that has largely rejected poetry as a popular medium, it has sold over a million copies over the last sixty plus years and has never gone out of print.

                                    I nearly wore out my copy of Ferlinghetti's Coney Island of the Mind.

Ferlinghetti’s masterpiece, one of my own favorite books of poetry, was unlike the work of most of the Beats.  It was lyrical and often told a story.  But then the poet often said he didn’t personally consider himself a Beat, despite his fondness for them, but considered himself a bohemian in the tradition of Williams, E.E. Cummings, and Ezra Pound.

50 Poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti 50 Images by Armando Milani was published in 2010. The following year Ferlinghetti contributed two of his poems to the celebration of the 150th Anniversary of Italian unification—Songs of the Third World War and Old Italians Dying inspired the artists of the exhibition Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Italy 150 held in Turin, Italy.

Ferlinghetti always considered his art an extension of his personal anarcho-pacifist philosophy and socialist politics.  He echoed one of his heroes, Vachel Lyndsay in his Populist Manifesto, “Poets, come out of your closets, Open your windows, open your doors, You have been holed up too long in your closed worlds…Poetry should transport the public to higher places, than other wheels can carry it.”

                                        Ferlinghetti's 2019 novel/memoir.

Meaning what he wrote, he has often brought his poetry to the forefront of the struggle for peace and disarmament, civil rights, and justice. Most recently Ferlinghetti has published I Greet You At The Beginning Of A Great Career: The Selected Correspondence of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg 1955–1997 in 2015 and Writing Across the Landscape: Travel Journals, 1960-2010 the same year. Barely a week before his centennial his new novel/memoir/stream of consciousness screed Little Boy was launched.

The rise of the Age of Trump has spurred scathing poems that show none of the old fire has been quelled.

Ferlinghetti still lives above the Bookstore.  He travels as widely as he is able.  He continues to paint and in 2012 had a 50 year retrospective exhibit of his works on canvas.

Ferlinghetti has always been an artist as well as a painter.  Liberty on Earth, 1992, mixed media.

His birthday will be celebrated with an open house party at City Lights Bookstore and neighboring cafés, bars, and galleries.  San Francisco Mayor London Breed has proclaimed March 24 Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day and several other events will be held across the city including a new solo exhibition of his paintings, Lawrence Ferlinghetti: 100 Years Without a Net at the Rena Branstein Gallery and a special screening of the documentary film Ferlinghetti by director Chris Felver at the Roxie Theater.

Way to go, master.  May we all live so long and so well.

Ferlinghetti at a jazz reading in the 1950's

Constantly Risking Absurdity (#15)

 

Constantly risking absurdity

                                             and death

            whenever he performs

                                        above the heads

                                                            of his audience

   the poet like an acrobat

                                 climbs on rime

                                          to a high wire of his own making

and balancing on eyebeams

                                     above a sea of faces

             paces his way

                               to the other side of day

    performing entrechats

                               and sleight-of-foot tricks

and other high theatrics

                               and all without mistaking

                     any thing

                               for what it may not be

 

       For he's the super realist

                                     who must perforce perceive

                   taut truth

                                 before the taking of each stance or step

in his supposed advance

                                  toward that still higher perch

where Beauty stands and waits

                                     with gravity

                                                to start her death-defying leap

 

      And he

             a little charleychaplin man

                                           who may or may not catch

               her fair eternal form

                                     spreadeagled in the empty air

                  of existence

 

        —Lawrence Ferlinghetti from A Coney Island of the Mind

A gathering of Beat poets in 1971.  Ferlinghetti top row center with Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso, Michael McClure, Kenneth Rexroth, Peter Orlovsky, and others.

Pity the Nation

After Khalil Gibran

 

Pity the nation whose people are sheep

And whose shepherds mislead them

Pity the nation whose leaders are liars

Whose sages are silenced

And whose bigots haunt the airwaves

Pity the nation that raises not its voice

Except to praise conquerers

And acclaim the bully as hero

And aims to rule the world

By force and by torture

Pity the nation that knows

No other language but its own

And no other culture but its own

Pity the nation whose breath is money

And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed

Pity the nation oh pity the people

who allow their rights to erode

and their freedoms to be washed away

My country, tears of thee

Sweet land of liberty!

 

—Lawrence Ferlinghetti  from A Coney Island of the Mind

 

Repeating a Statue of Liberty motif that he often used in his art work, Ferlinghetti

reading Trump's Trojan Horse.

Trump’s Trojan Horse

Homer didn’t live long enough
To tell of Trump’s White House
Which is his Trojan horse
From which all the president’s men
Burst out to destroy democracy
And install corporations
As absolute rulers of the world
Ever more powerful than nations
And it’s happening as we sleep
Bow down, oh Common Man
Bow down!

—Lawrence Ferlinghetti  

William Wells Brown Frederick Douglass’ Forgotten Rival— Focus on Black History Month 2021

                                    William Wells Brown in 1847 at the time of the publication of his first book of memoirs.

His life was as compelling as any character he ever created—up from illiterate slavery to international celebrity as a pioneering Black author and leading abolitionist.  In his day William Wells Brown was nearly as famed as Fredrick Douglass but today is barely a footnote in American literary and social justice history.   This post aims help fix that.

Brown was born in 1814 or ’15 near Lexington, Kentucky in the racially complex circumstances common to slavery.  His mother Elizabeth had both African and Native American ancestry and she was held in bondage by Dr. John Young.  She was repeatedly sexually exploited and gave birth to seven children each with different fathers.  His father was Dr. Young’s cousin George W. Higgins, a neighboring planter and a Mayflower descendent.  Higgins acknowledged the child and showed some care for him and his mother, at least to the extent of getting Young to promise not to sell either of them.

But Young, perhaps out of jealously, did sell both before the boy was 10 years old.  Both would be on the block again but managed to stay together.  They were held mostly in and around St. Louis where the boy was hired out as a deck hand on Mississippi steam boats through most of his teens.  He escaped the drudgery of field labor and got to see more of the world than most slaves.

In 1833 mother and son managed to escape together across the river into Illinois but they were soon recaptured and hauled back to St. Louis.  He was sold for the final time to Captain Enoch Price and was soon back on the river on his master’s the paddle wheeler.  A year later he jumped ship at Cincinnati on the Ohio River and was aided in his escape by a largely Quaker abolitionist network.  In gratitude he adopted the name of one of his chief benefactors, William Wells and the last name Brown.

Despite the anguish of being now separated from his mother, Brown set about making a new life.  He began with a program of self-improvement, quickly teaching himself to read and devouring newspapers, magazines, religious tracks, and any books he could find.  He also met and married Elizabeth Schooner and began a family that included two daughters who would survive into adulthood, Clarissa and Josephine.

                        Brown's Abolitionist connections led to a brief stint in Elijah P. Lovejoy's printing shop.

By 1836 Brown was literate enough and, more significantly, well enough connected in Abolitionist circles to go to work for Elijah P. Lovejoy in his Alton, Illinois printing shop where the noted anti-slavery zealot published the Alton Observer.  On November 7, 1837 a pro-slavery mob attacked a warehouse where Lovejoy was hiding a new printing press after two others had been smashed and thrown into the river.   The warehouse was set on fire and Lovejoy was murdered by the mob making him a significant early abolitionist martyr.

Brown left Lovejoy’s employment before the attack after he believed his identity had been discovered by the slave catchers active in the area.  He and his family fled north settling in Buffalo, New York.

Buffalo offered him both economic opportunities as a steamboat man on Lake Erie out of the busy port city.  It was also a center of the Up State New York vigorous abolitionist movement and a key link in the Underground Railway.  Between 1837 and 1849 Brown used the boats on which he worked, usually with the support of the owners or captains, to help hundreds of fugitive slaves who escaped to Canada either by taking them directly to Canadian ports or to Detroit, Michigan from where they could easily cross the Detroit River to Windsor, Ontario and safety. 

In his memoirs Brown said that from May to December 1842 alone, he had helped 69 fugitives reach Canada.  The effectiveness of the Buffalo connection and the Underground Railway as a whole was underscored by a report published by the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada that more than 30,000 fugitives had reached safety there by 1852.

Brown was also taking an increasingly public role in the Abolitionist movement and as a pillar of the Black community in Buffalo, and then estimated to number about 800.  He joined and was active in both Negro and integrated Anti-Slavery Societies and became active in the Negro Convention Movement which helped build the first national network of Black organizations of all types.  He also founded a Negro Temperance Society based in Buffalo that reported a membership of more than 500.  That also was a second bridge to white activists as Abolitionism and Temperance were the mother issues to generations of social reformers of all stripes.

He became an increasingly noted orator and lecturer.  His lectures were unique in that he incorporated music into the programs often singing to the accompaniment of a guitar or lap organ.  The songs were mostly adapted hymns and Abolitionist anthems by White composers and writers but included some with lyrics written by Backs, most likely including himself.

Brown became a staunch supporter and ally of William Lloyd Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) and declined to be involved with the Liberty Party formed in 1840 by abolitionists willing to work within electoral politics to support their goals.  Garrison and Brown opposed voting and working within the system.  The regarded the Constitution as a corrupt document enshrining slavery and democracy as a sham.  The short lived Liberty Party was a forerunner to the anti-slavery but not abolitionist Free Soil Party in 1848 and Republican Party in the 1850s.

                                                The title page of Brown's autobiography.

In 1847 Brown published his first book, The Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself which became a Northern best seller and was second only to Frederick Douglass’s 1845 autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.

Brown was now nationally in the top ranks of Black Abolitionists.  But he was also now publicly exposed as a fugitive himself and once again in danger of being pursued by slave catchers.

During these busy years he became estranged from his wife.  His two young daughters remained with him.

Little wonder that in 1849 Brown leapt at the chance to be a delegate to the International Peace Congress in Paris.   He brought his young daughters with him on his Trans-Atlantic journey in hopes of securing them the formal education that he had been denied.  At the famous conference where its President Victor Hugo introduced the concept of a United States of Europe, Brown was invited to give a featured address on the anti-slavery movement.  During the conference he also had a noted confrontation with pro-slavery American delegates who tried to prevent both his being seated and his speaking role.

After the Congress, Brown based himself in Britain where he launched extensive speaking tours to gain support for the American Abolitionist movement.  When Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 making it even more dangerous for him to return to America, Brown decided to remain in exile.  He was welcomed by the well-established British Anti-Slavery Societies which sponsored his lectures. 

Typical of his reception was this report in the Scotch Independent:

By dint of resolution, self-culture, and force of character, he has rendered himself a popular lecturer to a British audience, and vigorous expositor of the evils and atrocities of that system whose chains he has shaken off so triumphantly and forever. We may safely pronounce William Wells Brown a remarkable man, and a full refutation of the doctrine of the inferiority of the negro.

                                A Broadside advertising one of Brown's British speaking engagements.

While in England Brown took advantage of the well-stocked libraries of some of his Anti-Slavery Society sponsors as well as the ever reliable British Museum to read as widely as possible to make up for he considered the deficiencies of his education.  He also traveled widely across Europe both as a speaker and as a voraciously curious tourist taking time to absorb as much of the culture and history of each spot he visited was possible.

The result was his popular travelogue Three Years in Europe: or Places I Have Seen And People I Have Met published by the press of radical social reformer Charles Gilpin in 1852.  That was two years after Gilpin published a successful English edition of Brown’s slavery memoirs.  The book was the first volume of travel writing—an exceedingly popular 19th Century genre—ever published by a Black writer.  As a result he was now a genuine international literary figure.  And he had a driving ambition to expand on that in entirely new directions.

Bursting with inspiration and energy he wrote furiously.  The result was a novel, Clotel, or, The President's Daughter: a Narrative of Slave Life in the United States.  It was a breathtakingly daring tale of two daughter sired by Thomas Jefferson on one of his slaves.  It was based rumors circulated since the post-Revolutionary War era and well-founded suspicions as well as his own mother’s experience of sexual exploitation in bondage and the dark secret of the wide-spread miscegenation in plantation life.  Explosive stuff.

Thomas Jefferson's mullato daughter Clotel throws herself to her death in the  Potomac to  foil slave catchers in the climax of Brown's novel.  

When Brown was writing the details of Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemmings, the slave who was his dead wife’s half-sister were a closely guarded secret and certainly unknown to Brown except perhaps for reference to a Dusky Sally in John Quincy Adams’s anonymous ballad attacking Jefferson during the 1800 Presidential contest against his father.  But Brown’s fiction was not far off the mark.  We now know as a genetically proven fact that two of Hemming’s sons were fathered by Jefferson and later freed by him.

The topic was too hot for his previous publisher Gilpin to handle, but Partridge & Oakey issued it in London in 1854.  No American publisher dared print it until the Civil War.  The book is often considered the first novel by an African-American but it loses the title of first Black novel published in the U.S. to Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig issued in 1859 because of the delay. 

In 1854 the Quaker abolitionist Richardson family of Newcastle Upon Tyne in Northern England purchased Brown’s freedom from his legal master making it safe for him and his family to return to the United States.  The family had previously done the same for Frederick Douglas.

Brown and his daughters set sail for America.  But much had changed while they were gone.  On a personal level Brown’s estranged wife and the girls’ mother had died in 1850 completely severing that tenuous tie to the past.  They really had no home to return to—Buffalo had been a useful base but there were no deep ties there. 

The political and social climate had changed as well.  The Compromise of 1850 over the organization of Territories wrung from Mexico and the admittance of new states to the Union had satisfied no one and sectional differences grew sharper year by year fueled by the doctrine of  Popular Sovereignty that would lead to a bloody virtual civil war in Kansas between pro and anti-slavery settlers.  The old Whig Party, home to many Northern slavery opponents but also to anti-Jacksonian Southern  aristocrats and pro-slavery zealots had fallen apart and ceased to exist due to it irreconcilable contradictions.  A moderate anti-slavery expansion party, the Free Soilers had risen and almost immediately began its own steep decline.  Abolitionists were sharply divided among themselves over participating in electoral politics or a militant complete rejection of the United States consecrated in and founded upon slavery.  New social movements, including women’s equality and nascent labor movements raised questions of possible cooperation—and of possible conflict.

Brown decided to move to Boston, which served his ambitions well.  The Hub of the Universe was still the undisputed literary, cultural, and philosophic center of America.  It was also the center of militant abolitionism and an active hot bed of resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act, which had been strengthened under the terms of the Compromise of 1850.  Brown soon returned to the lecture platform and the circuit of appearances before local Anti-slavery societies and conventions.  He had programs tailored to both white and Black audiences.  For white audiences like the Female Anti-Slavery Society in Salem, Massachusetts he emphasized the unvarnished brutality of day today existence under slavery. 

Were I about to tell you the evils of Slavery, to represent to you the Slave in his lowest degradation, I should wish to take you, one at a time, and whisper it to you. Slavery has never been represented; Slavery never can be represented.

In front of Black audience he upheld dignity and emphasized historical accomplishments by noted Blacks.  He urged self-improvement, dignity, and temperance.  And while he appreciated White support, he told his Black audiences not to rely on it.  He urged community self-organization and not letting Whites speak for them which inevitably meant setting goals and limitations that protected White property and privilege at the expense of Blacks.  It was a radical and thoroughly modern sounding program.

As the tensions of the 1850 grew sharper, Brown despaired of the possibility of Blacks being able to make a safe and free home in a county awash in racism and in terror of Black retaliation for generations of suffering.  He began to promote a scheme for Blacks to re-settle in Haiti, an established Black Republic that had won Independence from France in a bloody revolution and had almost completely wiped out or driven out the old White plantation aristocracy, merchants, traders, and government functionaries.  This effort differed from the early earlier scheme promoted by the American Colonization Society in the 1830’s which was led by Whites eager to rid America of Freed Blacks.  Colonists had been recruited and had founded a society modeled on American Democracy but which itself displaced and oppressed a larger native population that never accepted or welcomed them.

It is unclear if Brown himself was ready to go to Haiti or to take a leadership role in colony there that was given at best an uneasy welcome by the Haitian government.  Only a few American Blacks ever made it to the nation before the Civil War dramatically changed the landscape of possibilities.

After John Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid which was financed by some of William Brown’s closest white allies in Boston, including the Rev. Theodore Parker, he had a crisis of conscience questioning the pacifism and commitment to non-violence that he long ago absorbed from his Quaker friends and supporters.  As war loomed, he reluctantly concluded that the nation could only be purged and redeemed by violence.

 

                Frederick Douglass, Brown's contemporary and rival.

Brown also continued his Temperance work and was increasingly also in vocal support of the movement for Women’s Equality that had emerged after the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848.  That put him on similar ground to Frederick Douglass, who had attended the Convention and remained a vocal ally of the movement.  The two men had met each other during the Black Convention Movement and their paths periodically crossed.  But they were never personally close and did not collaborate.  Perhaps there was a touch of wary mutual jealousy as the two often seemed to be in an undeclared competition.  Sometimes the two feuded publicly over differences.

Meanwhile, Brown had not neglected his literary ambitions.  In 1855 he published The American Fugitive in Europe. Sketches of Places and People Abroad, a revised and expanded edition of his European travel memoir including several of the important speeches he had delivered and a short auto-biographical sketch.

He also completed two plays.  Experience; or, How to Give a Northern Man a Backbone completed in 1856 was never published or produced and is now lost.  But its tantalizing title hints at what a bold and in-your-face script it must have been.  Two years later he finished The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom, an autobiographical piece about his flight to freedom.  It was not produced on stage in his life time but was published in 1858 making it the first published play by an African-American author.  Brown would often read from the script, acting out all of the characters, in lieu of a traditional lecture.  The play was finally brought to the boards more than a century later in a staging at Emerson College in Boston in 1971.

Also in 1856 Brown’s now grown younger daughter Josephine Brown published Biography of an American Bondman, an updated account of his life, drawing heavily on material from her father's 1847 autobiography. She added details about abuses he suffered as a slave, as well as new material about his years in Europe.  Josephine would have her own pioneering literary career and would continue to work collaboratively with her father on his later efforts.

On the personal front, on April 12, 1860, the 44-year-old Brown married again, to 25-year-old Anna Elizabeth Gray in Boston.  It was exactly one year before the artillery attack on Ft. Sumter in the Charleston, South Carolina harbor marked the beginning of the Civil War.  The marriage would prove happy and productive despite the gathering war clouds and produce three more children, two more daughters and a son, William Wells Brown, Jr.

                                    William Wells Brown about the time of the Civil War.

With the coming of War Brown supported efforts to arm Black troops, both Freemen in the North and eventually the contraband escaped slaves who flocked across Union lines.  After the Emancipation Proclamation in January of 1863 President Abraham Lincoln officially authorized the raising of Colored Regiments as a critical war measure.  Brown, too old to fight himself, helped recruit Black troops.   He introduced his Boston abolitionist ally Francis George Shaw who was financing the cost of raising the 54th Massachusetts Infantry to Robert John Simmons, Bermudan of “more than ordinary abilities who had learned the science of war in the British Army.” Simmons became a First Sargent in the Regiment which was commanded by Francis’ Shaw’s 24-year old son, Col. Robert Gould Shaw.  Simmons did indeed turn out to be a fine soldier and natural leader.  He died of his wounds after the legendary assault on Fort Wagner at Charleston on July 18, 1863.  Col. Shaw and much of the Regiment were killed on the gallant but fruitless attack on the heavily defended bastion surrounded by dunes and earthworks.

Brown was increasingly interested in history and on what we might call today the sociology of the Southern planter society that supported slavery and of the lost achievements of Blacks.  With the assistance of his daughter Brown wrote and published The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements in 1863; The Negro in the American Rebellion, 1867, considered the first historical work about black soldiers in the American Revolutionary War; and The Rising Son, or The Antecedents and Achievements of the Colored Race, 1873; and another memoir, My Southern Home in 1880 which was his last work.

With his lecture platform income disrupted by the War, the ever energetic Brown reinvented himself once again.  He studied homeopathic medicine and opened his own practice in Boston’s working class South End.  For several years he commuted there daily from the home he shared with his wife in Cambridge where he enjoyed access to the library and research facilities at Harvard.

Finally slowing down, Brown retired to Chelsea, Massachusetts in 1882 and died on November 6, 1884, at about age 70.

The Historic maker honoring Brown near the site of his Buffalo, New York home.

Brown’s memory has long been overshadowed by his old rival Frederick Douglass.  His memory was somewhat boosted by the Black History movement in American Universities in the 1970’s where he was seen as both a literary pioneer and an early exponent of some of the themes that would be embodied in the Black Power Movement.  Here and there are markers, or honors in some of the places he lived. In Kentucky where he was elected to the state’s Writers’ Hall of Fame and where an elementary school has been named for him.  In Buffalo a historic marker has been placed near the site of his home and his portrait is included in the outdoor Freedom Wall painted by artist Edreys Wajed along with 27 other abolition and civil rights legends commissioned by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and dedicated in 2017.