“this information needs to be publicized ASAP, particularly to the African-American community in D.C”
Sadly, 80% won’t give a flying rat;s rearend; they want the weekly checks or EBT card refills. The 20% who’ve joined us, are marginalized, as we are.
According to one document, held by the U.K. National Archives, Brown owned at least 121 slaves in 1826, comprising 74 females and 47 males. In 1817, he owned at least 124 slaves, made up of 74 females and 50 males. According to records held by the “Legacies of British Slave-Ownership” project at University College London (UCL), Brown was at various times the owner, manager, or executor of several dozen plantations and estates on the island of Jamaica.
Brown was also a steadfast slavery apologist. In contributions to the colonial House of Assembly, he opposed efforts, emanating from mainland Britain (where slavery was by then widely opposed), to “interfere” in the slave trade in Jamaica. In one 1823 speech, he lashed out at the “hypocrisy” and “cloven foot” of William Wilberforce, a British M.P. widely regarded as the hero of the anti-slavery abolitionist movement.
In 1832, a Methodist missionary named Henry Whiteley spent three months in Jamaica, touring the island and inspecting the conditions of life for slaves, and the practices of colonial settlers and slave owners, including Brown. In a pamphlet published the following year, Whiteley recalled that he and Brown discussed the concept of “amelioration” — a gradualist approach to slavery in the 1820s and 1830s which, as distinct from the outright prohibition and extinction of slavery that characterized abolitionism, instead proposed making slavery more humane and tolerable. Brown was opposed even to this, according to Whiteley:
… I was rather startled to hear that Gentleman [Brown] swear by his Maker that [amelioration] should never be adopted in Jamaica; nor would the planters of Jamaica, he said, permit the interference of the Home [London] Government with their slaves in any shape. A great deal was said by him and others present about the happiness and comfort enjoyed by the slaves, and of the many advantages possessed by them of which the poor in England were destitute.