Professor researches Mobile's ties to the Underground Railroad

Saturday, May 21, 2005
By RHODA A. PICKETT
Staff Reporter

Dashanaba King said that she simply wants to get Alabama on the map.

The college professor, in the United States after spending two years teaching in the southwestern African nation of Namibia, was in Mobile this week researching city history to find a link to the Underground Railroad.

According to the National Park Service, the Underground Railroad refers to efforts of enslaved African Americans to gain their freedom by escaping bondage. Wherever slavery existed, there were efforts to escape, at first simply to remote communities at the edge of more settled areas.

"I saw that my state wasn't on the map," King said. "There was surely something I could do for my state. I wanted to research the information about the Underground Railroad as it relates to Mobile."

King, who grew up in Birmingham and has relatives in Mobile, said that her interest to begin the research came after attending an Underground Railroad workshop at an Atlanta museum. In Mobile this week, she did research at the city archives, Mobile County Probate Court, the National African American Archives and the Museum of Mobile.

After just a week in Mobile, King said, "I'd found so much stuff, it'd make you cry."

The sites that are discovered may qualify for addition to the National Park Service's National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Program. An application and other information can be found at www.cr.nps.gov/ugrr.

According to the laws of old South, slaves attempting to free themselves became "fugitives," though, today, people would consider "freedom seeker" to be a more accurate description. While most began their journey unaided and many completed their self-emancipation without assistance, each decade in which slavery was legal in the United States saw an increase in active efforts to assist escapees, according to a park service news release.

In many cases the decision to assist a freedom seeker may have been a spontaneous reaction as the opportunity presented itself. However, in some places, particularly after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the Underground Railroad became deliberate and organized, park service officials said.

"We wanted to help define and illustrate the richness and the complexity of the story," said Diane Miller, national coordinator of the park service's Underground Railroad program, based in Omaha, Neb.