Underground Railroad Meeting Opens Many New Vistas on Slavery and Flight to Freedom

By Earnest McBride
The Jackson Advocate
Jackson, Mississippi

(Permission to post granted by Earnest McBride)

Baton Rouge – One of the most lasting impressions the 300 or so people attending the three-day convocation on the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom here was the unrelenting spirit of resistance displayed by the black African captives from the dawning of the New World up to the enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation and beyond.

Officially titled “Bound For Glory on the Bayou,” last week’s program was the result of over a year of planning and cooperation between a number of local community organizations, professional researchers and the National Park Services along with 15 other government agencies and groups seeking to map out the complex means and routes black American captives used to escape from slavery.

“Our people were not slaves; they were enslaved,” said Dr. Marquetta Goodwine, the elected Queen Priestess of the 700,000-member Gulla-Geechee Sea Island Coalition of St. Helena Island, South Carolina, one of the most widely studied, though least-understood black communities in the United States. A product of the blended African Gullah Society of the Sea Islands, she offered a series of libations –in English and Gullah-- late Friday evening “to give honor and homage to those who came before us.”

This was not the textbook variety of the Underground Railroad that provided black captives in America a means of escaping the frequently inhuman misery of their captivity. The “gathering” here has gone far beyond the well-known adventures of Harriet Tubman, the black “Joan of Arc,” or “Moses” in some accounts, or the lesser known efforts of Quaker Thomas Garrett of Delaware, known as the white “Moses” to many of the 2,000 blacks he helped to escape slavery. Even the inspired multicultural, direct action approach of John Brown was not representative of the much larger movement. (Tubman appeared before the conference in the person of Houston actress Vivian Abdur-Rahim)

Many new vistas on the almost universal resistance to slavery were presented last week, ranging from the blending of African and Native American resistance to form a new tribe known as the Seminoles, to individual or small group escapes, or to an entire community of black freedmen moving from early 19th Century Louisiana to the still-thriving community of Buxton, Canada. The significance of Buxton comes home to Mississippians in the form of I. D. Shadd, the speaker of the state House of Representatives in 1874 and Thomas W. Stringer, the first black man to hold a seat in the Mississippi State Legislature. Both were residents of Buxton before moving to Vicksburg after the Civil War. I. D. Shadd’s sister, Mary Shadd, was the first female principal of a public school in Mississippi, assuming that role at Vicksburg’s Cherry Street School in 1875.

Most revealing of all was the presentation of Leon Waters of the 1811 Louisiana Slave Revolt, the largest slave revolt to take place in the United States, but one that has never been written about in any of the school history books. Over 500 black fighters, men and women, organized an army that was determined to seize New Orleans in January 1811. Despite violent weather conditions and last-minute assaults by a U. S. garrison force, their cry of “On to New Orleans” inspired Waters and some other researchers to develop the forthcoming book under that title. Waters and his associates started out with few hard sources that could corroborate the obscure memories that some elder people told them about the uprising. But diligent pursuit in the obscure recesses of university and state libraries unfolded the tale that no white historians have deigned to reveal.

Comparing the New Orleans revolt with the Boston Massacre, in which only three people were killed, Waters said that over 65 people were killed in New Orleans. Kenner Airport in New Orleans is on 700 acres of the battlefield of 1811, says Waters.

No, this was not your father’s Underground Railroad, the weak and frightened trickle of black escapees hesitantly following their white abolitionist “conductor” to Canada or other points north. This Underground Railroad transported intelligent and proud warriors, inventors, thinkers, optimists and future rulers of their own and their nation’s destiny.

This train also carried black revolutionaries with the steadfast determination to achieve freedom or death, volunteers for military service from the Civil War contraband camps anxious to wage war against their captors, maroons (escapees into the swamps and marshes) with thriving economies and cultures very close to the same plantations they had escaped from, and self-determined political leaders of the Reconstructed South.

The real Underground Railroad ran in all directions, not just to Canada or Cincinnati or Boston. It ran into Mexico, California, the Bahamas, and the Caribbean. So widespread and frequent was runaway problem that Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 to protect the interests of the slaveholders of the South.

In announcing the event earlier this summer, a notice was submitted about “the Gathering of Community grassroots persons, groups and organizations, professionals, scholars, National Park Service coordinators, State Commemorative Area Specialists, U. S. Army Corps of Engineers Historians, Educational Institutions and general public.

Several field excursions conducted two busloads of conferees to Port Hudson, the famous battlefield 20 miles northeast of Baton Rouge, to the home and church of William King, founder to the Buxton community, and to the Bluebonnet Nature Preserve, an area south of Baton Rouge that typified the habitat of the Louisiana Maroons.

At Bluebonnet, historian Chuck Siler introduced the Maroon military leader St. Malo, whose base of operations was in the Lafayette or St. James region of Southwest Louisiana. St. Malo and his band of fighting men struck terror in the hearts of white slave owners for nearly forty years before he was finally captured and executed in the mid-1800s.

“St. Malo is the only documented maroon leader in the United States,” Siler says.

Port Hudson is famous for being the last stronghold of the Confederates along the Mississippi in the Civil War. Among the UGRR study groups, Port Hudson is better known as the site of the first attack against the Confederate Army made by black troops and officers newly enlisted in the United States Colored Troops brigade which eventually would number about 200,000. These black regiments, however, were not new to battle. They were the same men who were members of the Louisiana Native Guards, military units first organized under the French in 1729, commanded by black officers, and remained intact until the end of the U. S. Civil War.

Chief sponsors of the conference were the Natchez-based Friends of the Forks of the Road Society, Inc., the organization that has made the infamous Natchez slave trading market into a state and national landmark; the River Road African American Museum of Donaldsonville, LA; and the National Park Service’s special division known as the Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, which was established in 1998 under a Congressional mandate. Although at least 15 other organizations were listed as sponsors, the program coordinators attributed the major effort to the groups led by Ser Seshshab Heter (Clifford M. Boxley) of Natchez and Kathe Hambrick, founder of the Donaldsonville Museum.

“It was mainly due to the research and work of local groups like the Friends of the Forks of the Road Society and the River Road African American Museum that has allowed us at the Park Service to create the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom,” says Barbara Taggar, Southeast Regional coordinator of the National Park Service. “The underground railroad sites were being destroyed when Congressman William Proxmire approached writer Charles Broxton (Blockson) of Philadelphia about preserving the sites.”

Taggar pointed out that Broxton (Blockson) had written a long article about the Underground Railroad in the October 1984 issue of National Geographic Magazine. Congress, under Proximire’s leadership, passed legislation authorizing the preservation of important sites, with both slavery and the Underground Railroad as themes. The program coordinators have since expanded the scope of the UGRR and now include the contraband camps, Mexico, Canada, Indian tribal lands, any place that a fugitive from slavery could find a safe haven.

Much of the current work in the Network to Freedom program has been developed under the direction of Diane Miller, the national coordinator. Miller studied Afro American history at the University of Maryland and began work with the Park Service five years ago in 1998. She is based in Omaha and has noted the importance of Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri and other Midwestern states in the Underground Railroad operation.

“Some of the most important developments took place in Kansas over the fight against allowing slavery there,” Miller says. “Our hope is to establish the network as close to what it actual was at the time of the operation of the Underground Railroad. We encourage local groups to get involved and set up their own system of discovery. They can then become a part of the Network to Freedom program. And we’d be more than happy to have them join us.”

Although the Park Service gives all the appearance of being seriously in support of the Underground Railroad program, there is little if any money available to groups seeking to become a part of the network, according to Miller.

Friday evening also included a number of cultural performances related to the period and the people of the underground railroad era in the Southeastern U. S. Queen Mother Suma Diarra brought a group of young dancers, the Laini Kuumba Ngoma Troupe, Inc, --led by her daughter, Afnaw Diarra-- from New Orleans to perform dances that reportedly have been lost to history. These included the famous Bamboula, the music of which has been written by Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Afro-English Composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, and modern black composer Hershey Kay, recently deceased.

Bruce Barnes, a native of north Louisiana sang some of the songs passed on from his grandfather, who was a born in slavery, but who was also active in the underground railroad of his region. Barnes also demonstrated the “tut” language used by the black people of his home district when they did not want their activities known. That tut language is not related to the Gullah-Geechee, which also found its way into Louisiana from the Carolina coasts.

"Our anscestors are so angry with us because we use another culture and not the one they tried to pass down to us," said Queen Mother Diarra, founder of the Uhuru School on Green Street in Jackson, MS. "The old way is the good way."

Memphis proved to be one of the most active “stations” along the Underground Railroad. Elaine Turner, director of the Slave Haven Underground Railroad Museum of Memphis, depicted the vast slave market in the hub city and the almost equally vast network of antislavery workers whose work was relegated to the shadows because of the strict laws. One almost slightly humorous episode involved a man called Henry Box Brown, a man fleeing slavery in 1845 by being nailed in a large box and shipped north. He was discovered at the Memphis train station on the verge of suffocating because his air holes were too small.

Ads seeking to buy, sell or retrieve lost slaves infested the Memphis newspapers, as demonstrated by Turner. One of the biggest slave traders in the city was Nathan Bedford Forest, later known for his slaughter of surrendered black soldiers at Fort Pillow, and the founding of the Ku Klux Klan in 1865.