By Jody Fernald, for Black Heritage Trail NH
Edward Everett Brown, 1899
As young teenager Katie Brown rose to read the Emancipation Proclamation before a crowded South Meeting House celebration in 1882, she drew her courage from her grandmother, Annette Brown.
Katie lived with her grandmother on Portsmouth’s waterfront, where Mrs. Brown is believed to have taken in strangers seeking shelter as they escaped from slavery in the 1840s. Her husband was from Pennsylvania, where ships often embarked for northern ports carrying fugitives. Katie’s father and her uncle both served as sailors in the Civil War. By 1883, the household included only Katie and her grandmother.
The Emancipation Proclamation freed people enslaved only in the states that had seceded from the Union, excluding anyone still enslaved in the Border States. There was work left to be done. The Brown family would make a substantial contribution.
Annette Brown died in 1884, and Katie moved to Massachusetts, where she carried on the family’s activism. She married Edward Everett Brown, who shared her activist spirit.
The son of a Dover, NH, barber who came north from Massachusetts, Edward Brown studied law at Dartmouth College and Boston University. He became a founding partner of the first Black law firm in Massachusetts in 1888. Brown’s partners were Edwin Garrison Walker, the son of influential Black abolitionist David Walker, and James Wolff, who was born in Mississippi but raised on a farm in Holderness, NH, and attended Kimball Union Academy in Meriden, NH. All three men were prominent supporters of the rights of people of color and were founders of the Crispus Attucks Club of Boston.
Edward Everett Brown shared a podium with Ida Wells Barnett and Booker T. Washington in the fight against lynching. He co-wrote a national anti-lynching bill (White Bill H.R.6963) that went before Congress in 1899 and failed to pass, as did many other attempts to make lynching a federal crime. Brown continued to fight for successful legislation and popular support for this cause, as well as for opportunities for women of color as teachers, an ongoing struggle. For example, Elizabeth Virgil of Portsmouth, the first African American to earn a bachelor’s degree from the University of New Hampshire (1926), had to move to the South to find a teaching job in the 1920s.
Edward Brown died in 1919; Katie married a second time and lived until 1936. Both are buried in the Pine Hill Cemetery in Dover, NH. Katie’s sister-in-law, Nellie Brown Mitchell, a well-known opera singer, is buried nearby.
Jody Fernald is a founding member of BHTNH and a member of the first Board of Directors. She holds a master’s degree in American Studies and currently does research for the Trail. Angela Matthews has volunteered for
This article is part of an ongoing series aimed at highlighting and honoring the stories of notable Black historical figures and families who helped shape New Hampshire and Maine. These stories were originally collected by the Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire for a project with the Episcopal Church of New Hampshire. Stories are being shared with the partners in The Granite State News Collaborative."