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What if the Underground Railroad had an evil counterpart that ran in the opposite direction and transported people from freedom to captivity? Believe it or not such a thing existed.
Profs and Pints DC presents: “The Reverse Underground Railroad,” with Richard Bell, professor of history at the University of Maryland and author of Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home.
What if the Underground Railroad had an evil counterpart that ran in the opposite direction and transported people from freedom to captivity? What if there was a black-market network of human traffickers and slave traders who made their living by stealing away thousands of free African Americans from the northern states in order to sell them into slavery in the Deep South?
Believe it or not such a thing existed.
The most famous unwilling rider on this Reverse Underground Railroad was Solomon Northup, the author of Twelve Years a Slave and the subject of the Oscar-winning 2013 movie. But Northup was far from the only prisoner-passenger.
Over the first six decades of the nineteenth century, kidnappers stole thousands upon thousands of free black people, the vast majority of them children, from the streets of cities like Philadelphia. The victims were trafficked overland across the country, a journey of two million steps, and sold into slavery in Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi.
Join historian Richard Bell, who has earned a big following among Profs and Pints fans, for a gripping, eye-opening talk in which he’ll reconstruct the Reverse Underground Railroad in all its horror.
Dr. Bell will lay out the Reverse Underground Railroad’s origins and motives, as well as its scale and its spread. He’ll recover the lives of both the captors and captives. He’ll describe the routes the kidnappers took and the techniques they used to lure away free African Americans, and he’ll explain the dramatic impact these abductions had upon the growing antislavery fight. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)
Image: The 1837 kidnapping of Peter John Lee, a free African American man from Westchester County, N.Y., by four men from New York City (The Anti-Slavery Almanac / Public domain.)
