Updated February 12th to add:
Learn more about the
CBC Ideas Podcast
about Henry Box Brown at the bottom of the post.
[with thanks to Jeff Evason for letting us know!]
From the February 4th article "How Henry Box Brown escaped slavery in a box and became a subversive
magician" by Lisa Godfrey in the
CBC:
Henry Box Brown eventually returned to the United States, more than a decade
after abolition in 1865. He brought his second wife and children, who joined
him onstage, and sang with him.
He made his home base in Canada:
briefly in London, Ontario, and then settling in Toronto. It was here,
Cutter discovered, that he died and was buried in 1897.
Three
Toronto residents — history advocates Coralina Lemos, Adam Wynne, and
Pancheta Barnett — recently worked together to have a laneway named for him,
behind a house he lived in on Bright Street in the Corktown neighbourhood
east of downtown.
Read more.
From the February 3rd CBC Listen Ideas episode "The Amazing Henry Box Brown: From Fugitive Slave to Ingenious
Entertainer" with Nahlah Ayed:
Enslaved in 1840s Virginia, Henry Brown has himself nailed into a postal crate
and mailed to a free state. But that’s less than half his story. In freedom,
he becomes Henry Box Brown, and uses his escape box as the basis for a
subversive magic act that sees him tour the stages of the UK and Canada — his
final home.
Read more and listen to the podcast.
