Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance by Cheryl Janifer LaRoche (review)

Cheryl Janifer LaRoche’s aim in Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance is to unearth an alternative history of the Underground Railroad, centered on the clandestine and largely ignored work of African American communities in the southern regions of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. “The small rural settlements and their churches,” she argues, “were not necessarily organized as traditionally conceived Underground Railroad ‘stations’—deliberate spaces, planned or appropriated, often with the aid of White abolitionists, to hide and then facilitate a steady flow of freedom seekers to specific destinations.” Instead, “these first stops out of slavery frequently consisted of internal, church-based paths to freedom and salvation” (3). LaRoche focuses on four such locales, as well as on the complex web of families, churches, and communities operating in regions historians have often assumed to have been too dangerous for the antislavery movement. Thus the term “geography of resistance” encompasses both physical geography and human geography as well as the links between the two.

In both of these areas LaRoche has much to offer. Excavating the forgotten histories of these tiny black settlements reveals new sites of Underground Railroad activity, like Poke Patch, Ohio, situated only twenty miles from the Ohio River and in the midst of the state’s iron furnace region. The settlement attracted two hundred runaways, who moved between the furnaces dotting the land as they made their way north. While the homes of white abolitionists have traditionally dominated the public memory of the movement, LaRoche shows that iron forges, as well as caves and waterways, were instrumental in facilitating the first leg of runaways’ journeys. She also demonstrates the crucial place of church organization and church leadership in weaving the webs of resistance. Along with family networks and voluntary associations, these inextricably entwined, all-black organizations created the infrastructure that enabled the successful smuggling of slaves. Covert activity took place in church conventions, Masonic lodges, family gatherings, and through the movement of itinerant pastors. The Underground Railroad thus appears in this book as the work of a tightly knit and highly mobilized black community operating in the southernmost recesses of the North.

Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad also makes several sound methodological points, which will speak to historians across a wide range of fields. In order to excavate the histories of these forgotten hamlets, LaRoche has relied heavily on archaeology and on the close study of the physical landscape. In Miller Grove, Illinois, she found “foundations and wells, garden flowers and yucca plants” testifying to the settlement’s past existence (43). Cemeteries also figure prominently in her research: “Where towns or churches no longer exist, tombstones and grave markers remain as the last vestiges of a once vital Black settlement. . . . Inscriptions on gravestones provide genealogies for interrelated families living on the early Black frontier. Cemeteries mark free Black communities and connect them to the Underground Railroad” (102). In addition, LaRoche has integrated her findings into older maps of the movement, showing the close proximity between white centers of abolition and free black settlements, and between African Methodist Episcopal church circuits and known Underground Railroad routes. While the visual evidence is integrated into a traditional monograph, her use of maps as a form of evidence will be useful to scholars interested in the growing trend of mapping space and movement in digital forms.

The author has also made extensive use of oral histories, opting to believe what she heard from descendants and locals even when written evidence could not be found. She makes a forceful argument for this methodological decision: “I am cautious about disregarding lore and longstanding legends without research supporting refutation. Often we are less rigorous in denial of fact than we are in corroboration and acceptance. . . . I advocate preserving stories despite apparently implausible, anachronistic, or temporally and geographically inaccurate data. These same errors can and do...