Josephine Brown (1839 - 1874)

Elizabeth Josephine Brown was the daughter and biographer of escaped African-American slave William Wells Brown and his first wife Elizabeth Schooner. Josephine's account, Biography of an American Bondman, by His Daughter, was published in Boston by R. F. Wallcut in 1856. It was long believed to be the first biography written by an African American woman, but is now known to have been predated by Susan Paul's Memoir of James Jackson, the attentive and obedient scholar (1835).