Leslie Brown

Leslie Brown (1954 – August 5, 2016) was an American historian.

Brown was born and grew up in Albany, New York. She graduated in 1977 from Tufts University, and from Duke University with an A. M. and Ph.D in 1997. From 1990 to 1995, she co-coordinated "Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South".

She also worked on a monograph on African-American women and migration, a book about the black life in the segregated south, an edited collection of interviews from the "Behind the Veil Project", and a compilation of writing and speeches by Shirley Chisholm.

She had taught at Duke University, Skidmore College, and at Washington University in St. Louis, before going to Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where she taught from 2008 until her passing in 2016.

She died in Boston of leukemia aged 61.

• 2009 Frederick Jackson Turner Award
• 2011 Oral History Association Book Prize

• Upbuilding Black Durham: Gender, Class, and Black Community Development in the Urban South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2008. ISBN 978-0-8078-5835-6.