We all know our nation’s history of slavery in the South as well as many details and aspects of “The Underground Railroad”, a term used to describe attempts of citizens in the South to illegally transport enslaved people across the Mason Dixon line into the North to freedom. But did you also know that there were Northerners who kidnapped free Black people, sometimes entire families, and transported them to the South to sell them into slavery, a process sometimes referred to as a “Reverse Underground Railroad”?
This historical reality is revealed in the fascinating book Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and their Astonishing Odyssey Home by OLLI instructor Richard Bell who is currently teaching “The History Wars: The 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory.”
This book has opened my eyes to information I never knew regarding the extent of the toxicity of prejudice toward Black citizens in the North that existed to such a degree that selling some of them to Southern slave owners became sort of a “trade” back in the pre-Civil War era.
Our country’s history of prejudicial treatment toward minorities remains toxic in many places. But the extent of much of this, while moderating in most progressive areas, is being perpetuated if not increased in others. This struggle remains a work in progress as tribalistic tensions and the primal “fear of the stranger” seems imbedded in our human nature.
Bell's book communicates the emotional devastation of what some Black parents from states like Delaware, Maryland, and Pennsylvania experienced when discovering that their children had been kidnapped to be sold into slavery in the deep South. In addition, the book describes the dispassionate nature of those kidnappers who carried out these abhorrent acts.
None of this was ever taught to me in school. Having imagined myself well informed on such matters, I now discover myself to have been completely ignorant of this as well as many other facts related to the history of grotesque racism that were embedded in our American culture.
And therein lies the importance of The 1619 Project, which is designed to help educate people more fully as to the weaknesses as well as the strengths of our United States. Without such an understanding, it is less likely that our country can fully heal from its past sins, the residue of which lives on powerfully today in many parts of our populace. This helps explain why many people continue to resist having fuller knowledge of these facts being taught in schools to maintain the mythology of our United States of America, rather than seeking to reform ourselves by acknowledging and adjusting current realities to make amends. Understanding the many ways that some Americans were treated as property and not as people is in fact an important reality to appreciate.
It was a small number of people who participated in this “Reverse Underground Railroad”, and when identified those people were dealt with by the law in the North. While this behavior occurred before the Civil War, and while it can be painful to learn this truth, it is also true that the ongoing resistance to teaching factual American history remains a challenge even today. This history includes the grotesque reality that five of our first seven Presidents were slaveowners.
Teaching reality, not mythology, is essential if our country is to fully evolve into the actual United States of America that most of us want it to be. Indeed, failure to teach it has created enormous problems for America. The residue left by its absence continues to this day.
Dr. Hugh Winig is a retired psychiatrist and a longtime OLLI @Berkeley member and volunteer.