Henry Box Brown not only mailed himself in a box from Richmond in Philadelphia in 1849, but he also remediated this experience of embodiment later in competing slave narratives, on stage, in a panorama, and through his role as a magician and mesmerist. In these four “acts,” Brown uses the representation of his experiences of Black embodiment across various media both to support and—simultaneously—to undercut the mind-centered ontology that structured the system of chattel slavery’s reduction of Blackness to mindless matter. Rather than imagine ontological drift, as Bird does, or ontological betweenness, like Forrest, Brown uses different representations of Black embodiment to imagine existence as always already ontologically doubled, as something governed by the mind-centered paradigm that demeans the body, and by the body-centered paradigm that makes the material body’s expressive agency crucial for the fullest articulation of humanity. Brown suggests that consciousness emerges simultaneously from the mind and the body, and that by carefully curating these overlapping, and doubled, forms of consciousness, Black subjects can “mind the body” in order to imagine alternatives to white culture’s dehumanizing of Blackness.

In the 19th century, also black writers joined the increasing criticism against slavery. Most prominent was former slave Frederick Douglas and his writings, describing the terrible abuses of the slaver masters. After the abolition of slavery in the USA in 1985, racist discrimination of African Americans did not stop. After Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, lynchings and many forms of discrimination were prevalent, especially in the South. Important black writers were W.E.B. Dubois, and his contributions to the NAACP, also during international travels. Black sociologist Ida Wells was influential in her critical accounts of lynchings, as was feminist Anna Julia Hayward Cooper.