William Wells Brown: An African American Life

by Ezra Greenspan,
The San Francisco Chronicle, December 10, 2014

Throughout his life, as a fugitive slave, abolitionist lecturer, prolific historian, novelist, songwriter, playwright, physician and civil rights activist, William Wells Brown resolved “not to be a spectator, but a soldier — a soldier in this moral warfare against the most cruel system of oppression that ever blackened the character or hardened the heart of man.”