William Wells Brown and His Contributions to Society

William Wells Brown and His Contributions to Society
Martin Luther King, Jr. Booker T. Washington. Harriet Tubman. These African-Americans have become household names and their contributions to our nation cannot be overestimated. However, there are many other African-Americans who made important contributions to society whose names are often overlooked in the history books. For example, William Wells Brown was an African American writer, reformer, and abolitionist.
William Wells Brown was born near Lexington, Kentucky in 1814. His father was George Higgins, a white plantation owner, but his mother was a black slave. "My mother's name was Elizabeth. She had seven children, Solomon, Leander, Benjamin, Joseph, Millford, Elizabeth, and myself. No two of us were children of the same father" (Brown 13). George Higgins was a physician who owned a large farming plantation. His plantation primarily focused on the milling, selling, and farming of hemp and tobacco. Of the forty slaves Higgins owned, twenty-five were field-hands and were overseen by a man named Grove Cook (Farrison 298-314).
Brown served his master as a house slave essentially from the time he was born until the day he escaped. As a house slave, he was treated marginally better than the field workers in ways such as being better fed and clothed, not to mention that a house slave did not endure nearly as much grueling physical labor as a field worker (Osofsky 175- 197). William continued his childhood as a house slave but was never fully comfortable with his role on the plantation. He was continuously distressed about the punishments of the field workers. He often spent time standing at the plantation house door listening to the cries of the field-hands. “I could hear every crack of the whip, and every groan and cry of my poor mother… The cold chills