The Freedom She Spent on Others

Clara Brown was sold away from her husband and children at a Kentucky auction in 1835, and did not receive her own freedom until she was fifty-six years old. She traveled west by wagon train to the Colorado gold rush, built a laundry business into real wealth, and then spent nearly all of it finding and freeing others - paying passage for sixteen or more formerly enslaved relatives and strangers to resettle in Colorado, and searching for decades for the daughter she finally found at eighty-two. Harmonia walks through her life as an eyewitness, from the horror of the auction block to the quiet, radical choice to spend a hard-won fortune making someone else's freedom real - and reflects on how the truths of Reconstruction became the unnoticed water we swim in today. Transcript available at: https://harmonia.email/podcast-episode/freedom-she-spent-others Share and read comments: https://harmonia.email/podcast-comments?field_podcast_feed_value=harmonia_s_history&from_node=425