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  • Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance by Cheryl Janifer LaRoche
  • Lowell J. Soike
Cheryl Janifer LaRoche, Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014. 256pp. $95.00.

The civil rights movement and Civil War Sesquicentennial have prompted an outpouring of books covering politics and antislavery conflict during antebellum years. Together they have helped shift attention to African American struggles against enslavement generally and, more particularly, in midwestern states (then considered the West). Additionally, growth of the historic preservation movement since the 1960s broadened historical interest to include places surviving from antislavery events—buildings, archaeological ruins and hiding sites connected to Underground Railroad participants, notable incidents, and legal actions. The new book by Cheryl Janifer LaRoche contributes fresh perspectives to this growing literature. “[N]ineteenth-century Black settlements across the country, city or rural,” [End Page 92] writes LaRoche, “functioned as conduits to freedom, offering some form of sanctuary to those escaping slavery, independent from, yet often in partnership with, White abolitionist activities.” These words well summarize the welcome focus she brings to the subject, providing a much-needed perspective to Underground Railroad activities in the free border states.

Most Underground Railroad scholarship to date has shed light on this effort through the eyes of White persons who had helped African Americans in their escape from slavery, which tends to make them the central actors. After all, most printed stories came from an antislavery White recalling his or her experience with it. Now, with LaRoche’s research into established Black settlements in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, less documented stories are brought into the open, helped in part by exploring “family histories, personal narratives, and oral accounts” plus occasional newspaper articles. Through them many escapees are shown to have initially found refuge and aid among Black families and leading Black community members. Such deserved attention to Black involvement sharpens understanding about the full nature of these past events.

Free Black support to those who saw an opportunity to escape from bondage and seized it went largely unreported. I am reminded of local news stories that appeared about an 1855 incident on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River. Slave hunters at a ferry landing stopped a buggy from Iowa containing a Black man seated beside a White man and they claimed him to be a runaway. Upon being returned across the river for a fugitive slave hearing at Burlington, Iowa, local newspapers seemed unaware about how the Black called Dick had initially found the buggy’s owner, Dr. Edwin James. The answer came two weeks later in a letter by James to the Ohio Antislavery Bugle: the help had come from local Black residents, “Aunt” Kitty and Ben Sandridge who brought Dick to his farm outside town. Thankfully Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad brings such instances closer to center stage in relating these Black-White partnerships in the lower northern states.

Given the scarcity of contemporary writings about the lives of bygone black settlements’ and their specific connection to many Underground Railroad events, LaRoche turns to stories passed down through families that, in being told and retold by subsequent generations, help to reconstruct the times and families who participated in them. Each subsequent generation of course passed on what they had heard in light of experiences in their own time (e.g., persecution, consolation, and family loss), and these oral traditions [End Page 93] helped knit the black community’s past to recalled antislavery events that would otherwise go unknown.

The book is divided into three parts beginning with four chapters on Free Black Communities (one-half of the volume), each of which is devoted to the growth of a single settlement. Part Two on “Geographies of Resistance” focuses two chapters on the landscape through which escape routes ran in relation to Black settlements that provided sanctuary, the communities’ proximity to larger abolitionist centers helping lead many escapees further northward, and archaeological remnants left behind—long-gone churches, cemeteries, and landmarks that became reference points for oral traditions about connections to Underground Railroad activity. The third final part, in three chapters, cover the organization...

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