Brown Panelist at National Youth Summit on Abolition

To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History hosted the National Youth Summit on Abolition on Feb. 11.

Lois Brown, the Class of 1958 Distinguished Professor of African American Studies and English, joined a team of experts, scholars and activists in a moderated panel discussion to reflect upon the abolition movement of the 19th century and explore its legacy on modern-day slavery and human trafficking.

The event was webcast live to more than 2,000 students and adults from 31 states and to schools in Kenya, Pakistan and the Republic of Suriname in South America.

The program featured excerpts from the AMERICAN EXPERIENCE documentary The Abolitionists, which weaves together the stories of five of the abolition movement’s leading figures: Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Angelina Grimke, Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Brown. Lois Brown was on the film’s advisory board.

Brown’s fellow panelists included Kenneth Morris, founder and president of the Frederick Douglass Family Foundation and the great-great-great-grandson of Frederick Douglass and the great-great-grandson of Booker T. Washington; Luis CdeBaca, ambassador-at-large in the U.S. State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons; and Ana Alarcon, a high school student in Hartford, Conn., who is president of the organization Student Abolitionists Stopping Slavery. Allison Stewart, an award-winning journalist, moderated the event.

Brown, whose teaching and research focuses on 19th Century African American and American literature, history, and culture, as well as and race and memory in colonial and antebellum America, is the author of Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution and The Harlem Literary Renaissance: An Encyclopedia. She edited the first modern edition of Memoir of James Jackson, The Attentive and Obedient Scholar, the pioneering 1835 biography by Bostonian Susan Paul that is the earliest known biography of a free child of color and the first biography published by an African American woman.

Brown has held research fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. A 2000 Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Award recipient, she has been affiliated with the Harvard University Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research where she also has been a visiting fellow. Brown has lectured widely and published articles on African American literature, women’s writing, early American education, and African American history and religion. The Museum of African American History in Boston recognized her work with one of its first African American History Awards and lauded her for her “extraordinary commitment to American history” and her “obvious commitment to education and equality.” Her passion for African American history has led to successful curatorial experiences that have included exhibitions at the Museum of Afro-American History in Boston and at the Boston Public Library. Since 2003, she has curated and co-curated five exhibitions including two major exhibitions honoring William Lloyd Garrison: Words of Thunder: William Lloyd Garrison and The Ambassadors of Abolition and of Words of Thunder: The Life and Times of William Lloyd Garrison.