John M. Brown

John Mifflin Brown (September 8, 1817 – March 16, 1893) was a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. He was a leader in the Underground Railroad. He helped open a number of churches and schools, including the Payne Institute which became Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina, and Paul Quinn College in Waco, Texas. He was also an early principal of Union Seminary which became Wilberforce University.

Early life Brown was born September 8, 1817, in Odessa (then called Cantwell's Bridge), Delaware. His grandfather was a Methodist minister. At the age of ten he moved to Wilmington, Delaware where he lived with William Seals, a Quaker. Even as a student, he was frustrated by segregation in education, and moved from a Presbyterian Sunday school to a Roman Catholic school to avoid the segregation. His mother was Methodist, though, so he did not convert to Catholicism. After two years in Wilmington he moved to Philadelphia where his sister lived. He lived with Emerson and Henry Chester, a doctor and a lawyer, where he worked for them in exchange for secular and religious lessons. He attended St. Thomas' Colored Protestant Episcopal Church until January 1836 he joined Bethel AME church. In 1837 began to apprentice to be a barber with Frederick H. Hinton. He also attended an evening school taught by James N. Glouster. He also took time off from his apprenticeship to attend a manual labor school in Amherst, Massachusetts. Among his classmates from Philadelphia were Edward H. Ferris and A. G. Crippen. Shortly later he returned to Philadelphia, but did not remain, instead moving to Poughkeepsie, New York where he attended a school led by Rev. Nathaniel Blount and working as a barber with Uriah Boston. In the summer he worked in New York City. In the fall of 1838 he enrolled at Wesleyan Academy in Wilbraham, Massachusetts to prepare for college. In 1840, he returned to Philadelphia where he studied Latin and Greek. He moved west and in the fall of 1844 he opened a school in Detroit, Michigan, and soon after became acting pastor of an AME church in Detroit, a position he held until 1847. In the fall of 1846 he enrolled at Oberlin College in Ohio.

Underground Railroad In Ohio and perhaps before, Brown was an important activist in the Underground Railroad. He worked closely with local activists such as Delia Webster and Laura Haviland. One noted action was sending Calvin Fairbank to Lexington to retrieve the family of Gilson Berry. Another was the rescue of Lewis Hayden in 1844 and Alex Duvalls in 1851. In 1845, Brown joined the Boston Vigilance Committee.

Religious career In September 1846 he became a deacon in the AME church and moved from Detroit to Columbus, Ohio. He also became principal at the Union Seminary, which became Wilberforce University. In August 1852 he moved to Pittsburgh to preach, and later that year or early in 1853 to New Orleans. In New Orleans he helped raise the money for the Morris Brown chapel, but his work was generally opposed by local whites and he was imprisoned at least once for each of the five years he was in that city From 1888 to 1892 his district included Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Iowa. He worked with Frederick Douglass and others to push for the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, pointing particularly to an 1882 incident when Bishop Payne was removed from a railroad car and forced to walk to the next station while travelling in Florida. Brown was important in the move to include women in the AME ministry, licensing Emily Calkins Stevens to preach in the New Jersey conference in 1883. He was an outspoken and radical opponent of lynchings, especially in the 1890s. He was a delegate to the first World Methodist Ecumenical Conference in London in 1881 and to the second conference in Washington, DC in 1891. His funeral was at Metropolitan AME Church and was presided over by Bishop A. W. Wayman. He was buried at Graceland Cemetery.