William Wells Brown

"A New York State specialty license plate would provide a lasting and highly visible tribute to those freedom seekers, abolitionists, faith leaders, and everyday citizens who helped make our community a gateway to freedom." Because of its location along Lake Erie and its proximity to Canada, Buffalo became an important destination for freedom seekers escaping slavery.

The region's Underground Railroad history includes figures such as the Reverend Jermaine Loguen, the Reverend Samuel Ringgold Ward, and abolitionist William Wells Brown, along with many others whose names were never recorded.

Kearns also is asking the DMV to explore whether revenue from the plate could support the US Canadian Underground Railroad Committee's Underground Railroad Junior Conductors educational program and efforts to preserve and promote Underground Railroad sites across New York.

This specialty plate can be more than a symbol, Kearns said.

Correct.

But there, 'cause William Wells Brown, w- who originally came to Buffalo, um, originally, he moved to Boston when-

Oh

... and that's why I went, 'cause I wanted to go see him, I wanted to go, uh, see more and learn more about Harriet Jacobs because she had a boarding house at Harbor.

Yeah

... folks like William Wells Brown and Douglass and others, uh, we see some of the same humanistic ideas that we get from the Age of Reason, uh, for example, right? So, so I do think there is a way that some of these ideas are kind of universal.

Not that they've always been applied universally by folks controlling humanist institutions, but humanist thought, I think, has some universal elements.

And, and so we can see a, a kind of distinctly Black humanist tradition that has emerged separately from, from Enlightenment philosophy, from deism and-

Their story was infamous.

Elements of it are reflected in William Wells Brown's novel Clotel, or The President's Daughter, published in 1853, and Lydia Maria Child's play, The Stars and Stripes: A Melodrama.

The Crafts' own autobiography documents Ellen's transformation from a Black enslaved woman into the white, masculine but frail Mr. William Johnson.

According to the autobiography, when the Crafts reach Philadelphia, Ellen becomes a Black woman once again.

She helped establish the British Anti-Lynching Society in eighteen ninety-four, and her work on the transatlantic anti-lynching circuit demonstrates the ways African American women activists internationalized social justice work.

This built on the work of earlier abolitionists, like Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown, who also traveled to England to promote the abolitionist cause.

In eighteen ninety-five, Wells published The Red Record, which outlined the horrors of lynching to a Northern audience whom Wells did not think was-

AI shouldn't automate humanity.

Nineteenth-century speakers talked of conjure, of working roads, of tricks laid under a doorstep, of being fixed or goofered.

William Wells Brown, recalling a farm near St. Louis, described its resident oracle as deeply immersed in voodooism, gooferism, and fortune-telling.

And Charles Chestnut, would open the conjure woman with the gophered grapevine the terms overlapped rather than naming separate systems and hoodoo has served both as an outsider's label and as a name practitioners embraced gaining scholarly currency with hurston's report hoodoo in america One older phrase deserves attention, the two-headed doctor, as Hairston's New Orleans teacher, Luke Turner, called the man who trained Marie Laveau, a specialist who could heal and harm alike.

Louisiana Voodoo, which functioned in New Orleans as a religious economy of workers serving clients across the color line, overlaps with hoodoo without being identical to it.