Henry "Box" Brown Memorial (Richmond, Virginia)

Henry "Box" Brown Memorial (Richmond, Virginia)

Subject (Topic)
Antislavery movements--United States
Enslaved persons--Emancipation--United States
Public art
Public sculpture
Resistance
Slavery--Virginia
Virginia--Richmond

Subject (Name)
Brown, Henry "Box," 1816-1897

Subject (Object Type)
Commemorative sculpture

The memorial commemorates Henry "Box" Brown's harrowing journey to freedom. On March 23, 1849, with the assistance of James Caesar Anthony Smith, a freedman and white abolitionist, Samuel Alexander Smith, Brown shipped himself in a two-by-three-foot crate marked "dried goods" from Richmond to Philadelphia. Brown would later become a well-known antislavery activist, attempting to assist other enslaved people to escape in crates. The memorial includes a bronze crate meant to resemble the wooden one that Brown used. The crate is open and an outline of a crouching human figure is inscribed on the back panel of the box. An informational placard is sited near the sculpture, which details the history of slavery in Richmond and Brown's escape.

Unknown

Photographs by Renée Ater

2001

City of Richmond; Richmond City Council Slave Trade Commission; Venture Richmond

City of Richmond, 900 East Broad Street, Richmond, Virginia, 23219, United States

JPEG

English

Visual Arts-Sculpture

Box Brown Plaza, 1498 Dock Street, Richmond, Virginia, 23219, United States

Inscriptions on five sides of box:
"Buoyed up by the prospect of freedom...I was willing to dare even death itself."

"The idea flashed across my mind of shutting myself up in a box, and getting myself conveyed... to a free state."

"I laid me down in my darkened home of three feet by two feet."

"My friends...managed to break open the box, and then came my resurrection from the grave of slavery."

"I arose a free man."

Inscription on the stone platform:
"In a wooden crate similar to this one, Henry Brown, a Richmond tobacco worker, made the journey from slavery to freedom in 1849"

36 x 33.6 x 24 in. (91.44 x 85.34 x 60.96 cm)

Bronze

Encyclopedia Virginia. "Henry Box Brown (1815 or 1816-1897)." Accessed February 17, 2025. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/brown-henry-box-1815-or-1816-1897.

Brown, Henry. Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself. Manchester: Lee and Glynn, 1855. Documenting the American South. Accessed February 17, 2025. https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/brownbox/brownbox.html.

Renée Ater

Sculpture

36 x 33.6 x 24 in. (91.44 x 85.34 x 60.96 cm)