#1607 The Underground Railroad

That's long ago now.

So you're just getting almost like a first look, but there's so much more. And if you don't query the material, if you don't dissect it, if you just simply accept arguments as they are, you will always be stupid, because you will be controlled. And never argue with a racist based on their ideas. Always dissect whatever it is. that's the foundation of their argument.

And you always shut them up.

It's a qualified yes, but it's yes. And here I am in front of this school body. The last thing I want to do is say yes, because not everybody will, no matter who the audience is, will get it that this is a play. So I broke character. I pulled my wig off right then and said, look, we can't go on.

Let's talk about this. But it was great, because, of course, that's the question.

I grew up in segregation. I saw the foolishness. And I know that racists just don't die and disappear. There is embedded into our society the template of the 20th century that institutionalized discrimination in the same way that slavery was institutionalized. And we have not destroyed that template.

I'd like to hear that. But I thought, oh, we're entering a post-racial period. And, you know, look at us. I think a lot of people were taken in by that. And then, oh, my goodness, the reaction, the backlash, the hunkering down.

It was one of the ugliest things of my lifetime. And, of course, that thing is not over yet, that reaction.

So from that point moving forward, we've had difficulties. And I don't take my fist and beat people over the head. But I simply say this is what happened. This is the reality of how people thought. And it takes at least half of that time to create a thing, to dismantle that thing.

You're talking about essentially the 1970s as the time frame that we began, at least not adding to this issue. But we have only begun to recognize that we have to begin dismantling it. That is not saying we have done anything to really dismantle. And having a handful of Black people in an organization filled with white people is not change. It's tokenism.

People think tokenism is the same thing as integration. And it's not. I, as an individual, cannot integrate anything. Integration happens when there is representation that is equal. And this is not equal.

And on that particular board, the next time they had groups of people coming in, it was representative. I think they got that message. And I was glad because this is a group of lawyers. So I think they got that message that they really needed to start changing the way that they did it, the idea that tokenism is the same as representation. And that really is why talking about these kinds of stories on the Underground Railroad, which is tied into just the foundation of our nation, and how it was dependent upon the structure of slavery and the exploitation of human beings generationally.

It's important that we talk about that and we stop acting as if we're going to be offended or somebody is going to feel bad. And it's like, I don't really care whether you feel bad about the past. It's the past. You weren't alive, unless you're the Highlander. So can we just move on and really begin to understand how important it is to be honest about our past?

So you said that when the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments came after the war, after the Civil War, the white suffragists were, they felt that they were left out. They'd done all this work. They were abolitionists. They believed in social justice. They had worked hard with the African-American community.

And then Black males theoretically now had the right to vote, but women not. And this was really a source of great bitterness. That's a really tough moment in American history. And you see how these movements, when they hit the race wall, sometimes come undone and it produces some really ugly discourse.

But the dilemma that many had is they did not want society to be a heterogeneous society. They wanted it to be a homogeneous society. And they accepted this notion that God had destined white people to come onto the North American continent and to control it, as if they were the Jews coming out of Egypt and going into the land of Canaan. And they declared, of course, this idea of manifest destiny as a justification for everything that they did to Native peoples, to people of African descent. And as a result of that, if you're brought up in that environment and you're not challenged about any of your ideas, then when you are faced with this idea that somehow people that you have been raised and trained to believe are inferior, now have opportunities that you've been fighting to have for yourself, all of that hate, all of that racism, all those things you were taught come out.

And that was certainly what helped to really undermine the women's movement. You know, you had people like Frederick Douglass, who was part of that. He was a very strong supporter of it. And you had other women. You had Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, two women who couldn't read and write, but they had incredible memories.

And I personally believe that Harriet Tubman could not learn how to read and write because of the traumatic brain injury that she had, because there is a condition that doctors talk about when you've had traumatic brain injury that will impede your ability to put certain things together and to understand words and letters and so forth. But there were many other women, Black women, who were free, who were well-educated, who were vocal about their positions, and they were completely dismissed. But the problem for the white women is that these women were not going to be silent. They weren't silent during slavery, and they certainly were not going to be silent during this important period that I and a number of other historians call freedom's first generation, this period where you began to see the birth of first groups of people as a whole who were free. And in one generation, you saw a tremendous number of educated professionals.

My great-great-grandfather went over to Liberia as a missionary in 1859.

. That's where my great-grandfather was born. He was a Presbyterian minister, but he was also an educator, and so was his wife. When his wife and children returned, he would later become a principal of a school down in South Carolina. They were educating people because these cities and states, especially in the South, refused to educate African Americans, but they educated them, and many of them became professionals.

And so there was this battle. that was in public, but the way it was recorded historically has ignored the real battle that was occurring.

This is a special episode of Listening to America.

Welcome back to Listening to America. Cassandra Newby-Alexander, I'm so glad we're having this conversation. Thank you for being here. So, to explain to our listeners, I'll start and then you tell me where I'm mistaken, but many white people thought that slavery was wrong, but they weren't eager to integrate American life. So there were repatriation ideas, about sending freed slaves, freed and enslaved peoples over to a colony, a new, I suppose, black utopia in Africa, and they created Liberia, a place of freedom, and the capital, Monrovia, after James Monroe.

Your great-great-grandfather decided to do that.

We want you to leave the country. The problem is, even at that time, African Americans were not a single ethnicity. Exactly where would they go back to? And many of these people had just as much white ancestry as they had African ancestry. Exactly, how would you fit in when you don't speak the language?

You don't even know, perhaps, what ethnicity you were part of, what region you came from, what community you came from. You don't have that information. So you are an outsider, just as whites are outsiders. It's important that we talk about that, because too many of those individuals who were supportive of the American colonization society were resisting, acknowledging that Black people were not homogenous. You know, because there's still this tendency of talking about Blacks as if they're neither male nor female.

They have basically one ethnicity, and that's African, which is not an ethnicity. And that if they go back to Africa somehow, then that will settle all the problems. In fact, I think Europe is grappling with that right now. And that's why you see so much conservative, nasty, racist, reactionary thinking, because they're afraid that these individuals that they conquered and their countries they conquered, and then those individuals started moving to their country, that somehow they're being overridden by these individuals and they need to send them back to wherever they came from. And that notion is what's frightening, I think, white society globally.

The interesting thing is that our societies have never been neatly put into these boxes. You think of Portugal, for example, and Spain in the 15th century. You know, people who visited Lisbon would make comments like, I don't know if I'm in Africa or Europe. Because there were so many West Central Africans who were in Portugal because of the trade that was going on between those regions. And so our perceptions today have been blinded by our lack of knowledge of the past.

So I want to come back to the idea of white ignorance.

And when they say a racist bone in my body, they mean I'm not like a slathering, pitchfork, Ben Tillman, George Wallace kind of person who is openly, maliciously racist. And most of them are not that. But what they can't, the hump, they can't get over, is you can still be a racist if you think you're a good person. And if you don't have a visceral hatred of African-Americans, it's structural. It's the way you, it's how you were cultured.

It's your assumptions. It's it's what kind of talk in your family, the kind of talk in your church, the kind of talk in your schools. It's the way our police systems are patterned, in our judicial system and our ideas about prisons and so on. So that they say, how dare you call me a racist? Because they think that means that they've got a whip in their hands or that they're sneering.

And they why? why do they have such a hard time understanding that it's way more complex and deeper than that?

That seems to be that age where there needs to be that line drawn, because we can't have any race mixing going on in our society. And and I, you know, I remind people that ship sailed so many centuries ago. You need to get over that, because, you know, you really don't know who's who in our society, because that has been a thing for a very long period of time. And, you know, even when I'm thinking about the story of William and Ellen Craft, who escaped in 1858, you know, they escaped because they came up with this wonderfully creative idea that because she's, she looks like a white woman, but it would not be appropriate for her to be accompanied by a white enslaved man. She's going to pretend to be a white man.

And, you know, and nobody could tell that she wasn't white. And in fact, after they moved, because they were part of the abolitionist movement, they moved to London. They lived there for about 20 years. Her husband went to the kingdom of Dahomey and what's today? Benin and talked with the and really tried to convince him to stop engaging in the slave trade, because Dahomey was, you know, where they had the women warriors.

And, you know, they. when they went in, they they didn't. you know, they would take prisoners. But if they went in to kill, they killed. You know, these were the fiercest warriors ever.

And Ellen didn't go with him because she knew that she looked too white to be accepted by them, which is kind of the irony of all ironies. Here is this this woman who's enslaved, who doesn't at all look like she's Black, and she can't even go back to Africa and be accepted as an African-American or as a Black person because of this race mixing. And, and so I think that our society, first of all, has to begin to have those conversations about race.

And this was right on the eve of the Civil War. And so, within this church that was rebuilt, they built the church over these, this tunnel, and they found that out as they were doing this archaeological work, because when they discovered this tunnel, they stopped everything. Because in Norfolk, Norfolk is at and below sea level. And so they stopped building basements in the late 1960s or around the 60s because of the water table. And so the idea of a tunnel is just unreal.

But the church was kind of built high. It was. it's probably about 25, 30 feet above sea level. And so they they discovered this tunnel and they didn't know what to make of it, because there was no record of any kind of waterworks or anything existing in that area. In fact, they didn't build any tunnels of any sort for waterworks until the 1870s, 1880s.

This tunnel with the brick dates back to the 1840s. And so they're trying to figure out where did this come from? And then, as we begin to add these pieces of these individuals, there was a this young boy that Mary Ogilvie purchased. His name was Mark Rene DeMorty. And he was tied in with Benjamin, excuse me, not Benjamin, but Dr.

Lundy to help people escape. And so we have some of the names of the people who escaped, because William still started recording some of them in his narrative in the 1850s. Well, when Mark Rene DeMorty was working with Lundy, this was in the early 1840s and it went on through to 1847.. Well, eventually, Mary freed him right before he turned 21, so that he could go back and forth between Norfolk and Boston. A letter of his got intercepted by officials in Norfolk because they suspected his activities.

And so he fled and made his permanent residency in Boston because they knew that he was involved with the Underground Railroad. And he later became a very wealthy man because he was an entrepreneur and inventor and so forth, and wrote his narrative that was published in the late 1890s about his life and experiences. Well, Mary Ogilvie would eventually marry a man from Guadalupe and adopt his last name, Levest. And as it turns out, this was Mary Levest, the same person who would later, because of her husband, who worked over the Gosport Navy Shipyard that became the Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth, he got a hold of the plans of what would be the CSS Virginia, what was the USS Merrimack. And she got those plans and made her way, we believe, first to Fort Monroe, then got aboard a ship.

Now, this is during the Civil War. Got aboard a ship and went all the way to Washington, D.C. and said, I'm not giving this to anybody other than William Seward. And they actually, I'm sorry, not William Seward, Gideon Wells. And they actually let her see Gideon Wells.

And she gave him the plans. And that confirmed that what the Confederates were doing, and they actually sped up the construction of the USS Monitor. And so here you have this story of people who were actually involved in the Underground Railroad, a church that actually altered its architecture so that they wouldn't disrupt the tunnel, a tunnel that went from inside of the black community in the direction of two of its major black churches, another tunnel that was connected, that went in the opposite direction, into where people were living. And these individuals were hiding out and traveling through this tunnel down to the, where they were making their way to New Bedford, to Boston, and to Philadelphia. And so when you just discover this information, it tells you how the Underground Railroad is a gift that keeps on giving.

But it also speaks to people's determination and resilience and how that was probably the best secret that people actually kept. And that's why every community is discovering new things. In fact, there's a big effort in North Carolina, all in the eastern part of North Carolina, where the rivers are all intermingled everywhere, just like in my area of Hampton Roads, where you can't go a mile without seeing water or crossing a creek or a river or whatever. Those rivers were the lifeblood of the area, and everyone traveled by river or by creek. And there were boats galore.

And so the idea that somehow you could really secure the area was a pipe dream. And people in both North Carolina and Virginia really understood that. And the folks in Maryland, well, they just kind of started giving up on slavery. And Maryland, and then later Virginia, began selling enslaved people to the slave markets in Charleston and in New Orleans in large numbers, because they could get as much as $1,500 to $2,000 for these people, which really, in today's dollars, amounts to between $60,000 and $70,000.. And so they knew that they could not really secure the area from escapes.

And that's why you see such a concentration of people who escape mostly by water. There's this illusion that most were escaping on foot. And even with Harriet Tubman, a lot of the accounts talk about her running on foot, but she used the blackjacks. She got to know all of these people who worked the waterways. And she knew the landscape.

And this is what really frightened a lot of whites, because they knew that the majority people who were operating the ships and these ferries and so forth were African-Americans. And they escaped that way. There's a recent book that came out talking about the Underground Railroad in Nebraska. And most of the people who were escaping from Nebraska were coming out of Nebraska City, which was right there on the Missouri River, and going straight up into Iowa that had a huge Underground Railroad network that would take them to Chicago and beyond. Those stories help us to really understand our society was very complicated.

And in a small town, everyone sees everything. And so those who saw it sometimes just turned a blind eye, even though they may have been white and they knew this was, you know, these were people escaping. But they turned a blind eye because they really didn't support slavery or they didn't want to get involved.

They don't count people who left aboard British vessels during the American Revolution and the War of 1812.

. And they don't count the people who escaped prior to the 18 or the 1790s. And so 100,000, I think, is probably a small number, but we'll stick with that as a guesstimate.

Welcome back to Listening to America. Cassandra, Newby, Alexander. So, Cassandra, if I walked down the streets of Chicago or Denver and asked everyone I met, what's the Underground Railroad? Most people, I think, would say, oh, that's how slaves got out of the country in the 19th century. And if they had any name to associate it with, they would say Harriet Tubman.

Is that right? Is that fair? Give us a little sketch of her.

It was filled with a lot of dynamics. Because topographically, it was part of the South. But because it was also on the eastern seaboard, there were a lot of, I mean, the shipping industry was big in Maryland. You had big cities like Baltimore that were major port areas in the South. And she didn't live in the big city.

She lived just like Frederick Douglass, only lived for a short period of time in Baltimore. They lived in the rural area. And by the time she was six years old, she started getting hired out because a lot of slaveholders couldn't make money with their enslaved population. The tobacco industry was not doing that well. And if you weren't basically big business, if you weren't on a corporate plantation with hundreds of people, you probably were not going to make money by the time you got into the 1830s, 1840s, because we were moving more towards corporate slavery.

And what I mean by that is you started to see along the eastern seaboard, people who were typically producing tobacco and so forth. They didn't need as many people. The population was expanding. Unless you owned a lot of people, 400 or more people on multiple plantations, it was difficult to compete with that type of slaveholder.

Many of the people who moved into Kansas and Nebraska and became part of the leadership were coming out of Virginia, and they were coming from privileged families coming out of Virginia and going there. There's a lot of mythology about this rags to riches concept that we still kind of perpetuate. And so Harriet Tubman was brought up in this environment, and she, as a child, here she is taking care of a child who's older than she is. She's expected to do certain tasks and found out that if she did it wrong, she got beat. She was always whipped.

As a child, a six-year-old child. And eventually, she wasn't good laboring in the fields, and she was very uncooperative working with children or in the domestic world. So they kept trying to find a place for her to do things. And that experience, she was working on the waterways at one point. That experience actually was part of how she learned not only the landscape, but how to operate.

So all of that came into play for her as an important conductor on the Underground Railroad. When she was a teenager, she got caught in the middle of an altercation. There was a man who was running away, and the foreman threw this weight at him and hit her in the head. And even her owner tried to sell her away because he figured she was going to die. So it took a very long time for her to recover from that traumatic brain injury.

And after she did, she still had numerous epileptic seizures. Eventually, she married a free Black man who lived next to the plantation or near the plantation she was on. But she saw two of her sisters sold away, and she heard that she was next. And it was because the slave trade in the South was getting big, and a lot of people they were either poor farmers, managers of plantations, or it was just more lucrative to sell. And she was a young woman, but she never had any children.

And so the idea was, if you're a young woman, you're probably going to produce children, and that meant that you were valuable. But after a while, by the time, she hit her mid-twins, and she still didn't have any children, she was seen almost as damaged goods. So they were still trying to figure her out. She tried to make an escape once. Her husband forced her back.

Then she tried again with two of her brothers. They got scared and made her return. And finally, she set out on her own. She was told to follow, to keep the river on her left side. That was helping her to go north.

She was also very deeply religious. She talks about how, when her owner died, and he was a man who was brutal, who had promised he wouldn't sell them, but then was making plans to sell them. So after she found that out, she was praying for God to give him a healing power over him. After she found that out, she said, Lord, if he won't change his mind, just kill him. And after she started praying, that man died.

So she was a little taken aback by that one, but it emboldened her. And she was very deeply spiritual and followed her instincts. And those instincts got her to freedom with the assistance of this Quaker woman who told her who to contact once she got to this point. See this person. See that person.

Her mother was still in bondage. She wanted to get every one of her relatives out. And she managed to do just that, going back, I believe, up to 19 times. And every time she went back, she assumed a different disguise and had a different path. She never went the same place twice.

She always carried a gun, and the gun was for protection and to keep people from turning around, because her position was that if you turn back, you would tell everything and you would put the lives of so many people at risk. And so she said, dead men tell no tales. And so you go on the journey, you're going to stay on the journey and we're going to make it together. And I loved the way they depicted that in the film Harriet. I was so excited to see that, because no one, first of all, had really depicted William still.

To see him talking, and what he would do is he spent so much time getting people to narrate about their lives because it wasn't enough to just talk about, OK, so I escaped here. This is how I made it. Tell me about who you are. Tell me about your life.

It's a great American story about love of freedom, about enterprise, gumption, perseverance.

Once you open up that can of worms, you've got to go all in. And, you know, when you're talking about a person like Harriet Tubman, or you're talking about a person like Frederick Douglass, who had to write a biography, an autobiography, just to prove to some people that he actually had been enslaved. And they still didn't believe it because they were going along these tropes. These tropes said, if you escape, it must have been because some evil white people convinced you to do this, that you don't have enough inside of you to want to do this. It all goes back to this me, me, me thing.

I am going to have to acknowledge or face certain things. And I don't want to face those things. I don't want to acknowledge those things. So, when it comes to people like Ron DeSantis, those stories of real sacrifices, of real tragedy in so many ways, this ingenuity, this ingenuity to talk about achieving freedom, well, it counters then the narrative that says since 1776, we've all been free. So we prefer not to complicate this very first grade way of thinking about our past.

We would prefer to see it in a way that's filled with all kinds of stereotypes and illogical ways of thinking and just overly simplify it so that we don't have to deal with what's really going on right now. And what's really going on right now is we're at a crossroads. Our nation is shifting dramatically at its very core. And people are frightened of change and even more frightened of cataclysmic change. And we'll do anything and everything to try to stop that.

It's like people, once you get a certain age, everything in your past was wonderful and glorious. And I remind people, please stop talking about the past as if it was just the most wonderful thing in the world. It wasn't that wonderful. And when you were a child, you hated being a child because somebody told you when you had to go to bed and where you had to eat and what you had to do. You're only thinking about that because you've gotten older and you've got all these aches and pains, and you've got more years behind you than ahead of you.

So stop with all the melancholy. And let's just kind of get a grip on what really is that way. And so he represents those individuals.

But people want to conveniently forget that. And they want to conveniently forget that America's wealth and America's power was on the neck, the back, the head of slavery. And without that, we would have been a very different country. And we're still in the process of recovering from that. We're like recovering alcoholics.

You never quite get over it, you know, and you can always fall off the wagon. And I think we keep falling off that wagon because we're still recovering alcoholics. And we still think that drinking is going to, we can control it. You know, we can somehow sneak back into it. When in reality, you have to look at the way, the path moving forward, as being very different than the way it was.

I mean, it feels to me as a privileged white person looking at all this from the outside, that we're in a deep retrograde motion. Am I right? Or is the trajectory still trudging forward?

But they're still moving forward. Imagine what America could have been if it did not have slavery, if it didn't have discrimination. How many people have we killed who may have had the cure for cancer? Because we hated them because of their race. We didn't educate them, even though they showed incredible talent and ability to invent and to create.

How many things in science have been created or discovered by African Americans that we have appropriated? and we don't talk about who did it, we've made them white. But these were African Americans who did this. I think we keep hurting ourselves. And instead of opening that up, we have deprived ourselves, I believe, of tremendous advancements.

I know that the South did. The South hurt itself significantly because it restricted the intellectual power of African Americans, refusing to allow them to be educated. And I think today we're still doing that because we want to control people. We don't want them to achieve, because then we can't make money off of their ignorance. We can't be in power because of that.

And we lose so much. So I think we're going to go through a period of losing a lot because we are refusing to embrace what we have and to use that to help all of us collectively.

. It seems to me we have to have the conversation you and I have just had. And that's only a preliminary conversation. I don't see how we can reach that milestone without letting this conversation be one of the three or four central conversations about the American experiment.

It should be a device that you use to learn and to educate yourself. You have at your fingertips access to libraries of the world. And a lot of young people are interested because it's their future. My generation is basically dying out. I'm part of the baby boomer generation.

So we're reaching that age where there are a lot of people who are leaving this earth. Those Gen Zs, they're seeing their future and they don't want my generation to stop their future. And once they get past that youthful lack of focus, I believe they're going to be a powerful generation. And yes, you've got some who are listening to other people. They're not getting into who's right and who's wrong.

They're saying, this that's happening right now is wrong and you need to stop it. They're not in those traditional lines of thinking that my generation is in. I remind people, these are 21st century people. They're not 20th century people. 21st century people do not ask the same questions, do not think the same way as 20th century people.

And it's a good thing. And so my hope is that we are, it's like sometimes there's one step forward, two steps back. But then, when we take that one step, sometimes it's a leap. It's not just a little step. And so I think that this period that we're in is temporary.

It might be a hard period, but it's temporary. It's not sustainable. And so that's where my hope.