This February, the CBC put out a podcast episode and associated article about Henry Box Brown, an enslaved person in Virginia who, in 1849, shipped himself to freedom in a wooden crate. He went on to perform as a magician and mesmerist in England for 25 years. When he returned to North America, he ultimately settled in Toronto, Canada, where he lived until his passing in 1897. To commemorate his legacy, local residents worked to have a laneway behind his house in the Corktown neighborhood of Toronto named after him. They were successful— the street sign “Henry Box Brown Lane” went up last year.
“There are all these ways that we can think about Box Brown: as performance artist, as visual artist, as public speaker, singer, author,” Yale professor Daphne Brooks told the CBC. “He had this limitless resourcefulness in the way of artistic resistance that marks him as exceptional in a field of exceptional individuals who fought their own trafficking.”
You can find the full 54-minute Idea episode, “The Amazing Henry Box Brown: From Fugitive Slave to Ingenious Entertainer,” on the podcast platform of your choice.
Public domain images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons