Henry Box Brown was born a slave in Louisa County, Virginia, in 1815. He married a local slave but in 1849 his wife and children were sold to a plantation owner in North Carolina. Brown decided to escape and with the help of a sympathetic tobacconist, he arranged to be sent in a box to James McKim, an anti-slavery campaigner in Pennsylvania and a member of the Underground Railroad. The box was only three feet long and two feet wide. Brown survived the journey.
As well as becoming a well-known speaker for the Anti-Slavery Society, he wrote his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown (1851).
In 1997, Brown was the subject of a Tony Kushner play entitled Henry Box Brown or the Mirror of Slavery.
