One of Larry McClellan’s favorite stories he researched as he was putting together his new book about freedom seekers and the Underground Railroad involved a group of bounty hunters in pursuit of people who had escaped slavery and were taking shelter on the outskirts of Chicago.
The hunters sought information from Lewis Isbell, a formerly enslaved man who had come to Chicago in the 1830s and became a leader in the city’s Black community. Isbell, who knew where the people were staying, told the men to come back the following day and he would lead them to the hiding spot.
Upon arriving the next day, the slave hunters were greeted instead by “all these Black guys with clubs who beat the crap out of them,” McClellan said.
Isbell had instructed the surprise party “not to kill them, but to beat them so badly they’ll never come back to Chicago,” McClellan said. “It’s a great story.”
McClellan has been collecting stories about the Underground Railroad for decades. But over the years, his relationship with the very concept of the Underground Railroad has shifted dramatically.
“What became strikingly clear to me is that we really have to reframe the conversation,” he said. “For the 180 years we’ve been talking about the Underground Railroad, the focus has been on the activities of the people who were helping.
“It’s important to reframe it so we understand deeply that all of this happened because of people making the decisions to escape from their enslavement. It was the movement of these freedom seekers that created responses. Eventually it created responses by Black and white abolitionists in Illinois and across the North.”
It’s a message that got lost in the years following the Civil War, when it became fashionable in the North to have been part of the network of helpers.
“A lot of people — white abolitionists and some Black abolitionists — really made sure their stories were being told, so that information was more visible,” McClellan said.
:quality(70)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/tronc/BRLXRGPJSVARFF3NCRP6E53MNI.JPG)
The press of the late 1800s and early 1900s was filled with stories “glorifying these heroic white guys who were willing to break the law” in the moral cause against slavery.
“There was a certain amount of danger, and we need to honor that,” he said. “But we also need to honor the incredibly dangerous long distance journeys the freedom seekers are making.”
McClellan, as he puts it, has been kicking around the area for a long time. He was among the educators who helped organize Governors State University 53 years ago and was mayor of University Park, then known as Park Forest South, in the 1970s. His interest in telling the stories of the Underground Railroad is a natural combination of his interest in social justice issues and fascination with history.
“In trying to understand the history of the Chicago Southland, I ran into these references of the Underground Railroad. It was really interesting to me that there were these people in Crete, the south end of Chicago, New Lenox, Lockport and other places that were helping on the Underground Railroad.
“Of course, fugitive slaves were coming through here, and that was who they were helping, but who were these interesting abolitionists?”
As he dove into those stories and started getting into intense research for earlier books, the protagonists began to shift, especially once he learned about Caroline Quarlls, whose journey to freedom started in Tennessee and eventually went through Naperville and Crete as she made her way to Detroit and Canada.
“We have to tell the freedom seeker stories,” McClellan said. “That’s where the real power is. That’s where the whole process needs to be humanized.
“Again and again in Underground Railroad accounts, the fugitive slaves are described by the way people did heroic things to help them. That’s upside down. The really remarkable stories are the ones of the people who made the decision to seek their freedom.”
The result of that realization became “Onward to Chicago: Freedom Seekers and the Underground Railroad in Northeastern Illinois,” just out from Southern Illinois University Press.
It also was an opportunity to shed new light on what had been a long-established storyline in Chicago.
“The traditional Chicago story of the Underground Railroad starts in 1839 with a group of courageous white guys who assist this bewildered, bedraggled fugitive that just shows up, and they gathered him up and helped him and so on,” McClellan said.
That narrative likely originated with Zebina Eastman, editor of the abolitionist newspaper Western Citizen.
“The Illinois history books, the Chicago books, they all start with Eastman’s story in 1839,” he said. “That’s just not true.”
For one thing, years before that, an established Black community in Chicago, including Lewis Isbell, was already assisting freedom seekers, he said.
And while the tales of the helpers got picked up and repeated, the tales of the courageous travelers became buried by time.
But many freedom seeker stories had to be pieced together from various sources, “like assembling a jigsaw puzzle,” he said, using material published in the late 19th century and then forgotten.
While newspapers from the 1840s and ‘50s were “a fascinating resource, they were really a mixed blessing because many of the stories got fictionalized or became overly dramatic.”
The Tribune, for example, had an “enormous set of stories about individuals who made their way through Chicago, but you have to read them with a grain of salt.”
McClellan devoted much of his time to the stories of freedom seekers and their relationship to the region. He has regular speaking engagements and will do book signing events this fall.
:quality(70)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/tronc/ADG3FXXFFZGVDIRFP5QELZ6FZE.jpg)
He’s also heavily involved with the Little Calumet River Underground Railroad Project. While he’s adamant the stories of the freedom seekers should be the focus, it’s important to recognize the places they traveled, too. When he gives talks in Monee, he discusses people’s journeys up the Illinois Central Railroad line that runs through town.
One of McClellan’s favorite spots is the Indiana Avenue bridge over the Little Calumet River in Riverdale, a regular stop on project tours. It’s a place that gives modern people a reference point for the freedom seeker journeys.
Daily Southtown
Twice-weekly
News updates from the south suburbs delivered every Monday and Wednesday
“Every time we do that it’s a powerful experience for me,” he said. “To realize 500 people or more who were on their way to freedom walked right here. How more tied to a place can you get?
“So often, the journeys were diffuse, but because of an accident of geography, they had to get across the river to get around the bottom of Lake Michigan. This is a place where that concentration happens.”
Not all the tales in McClellan’s book end with freedom for those who sought it. We’ll never know how many people who undertook that dangerous journey ended up being recaptured and tortured or killed, he said.
“But that’s part of the whole story,” he said. “Can you imagine the courage that took? Some of the people walked hundreds of miles. The stories are staggering.”
He likes the story of Lewis Isbell, not just for the comeuppance inherent in evil people being beat up. Isbell, “one of the great Chicago figures that nobody’s heard of,” was part of a larger community of “young Black families who became real activists in the 1840s, and the Underground Railroad becomes something of an open secret” in Chicago.
“They end up working closely with a group of young white activists who are also working with freedom seekers,” he said. “It’s not too much of a stretch to say Chicago’s first great Civil Rights movement was not only the escaping freedom seekers, but the racially diverse movement for freedom that assisted them.”
Landmarks is a weekly column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at peisenberg@tribpub.com.
"freedom" - Google News
August 12, 2023 at 05:47PM
https://ift.tt/u0vMVzN
New history restores freedom seekers role in Underground Railroad - Chicago Tribune
"freedom" - Google News
https://ift.tt/eDG0F3w
https://ift.tt/pCKRPwn
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "New history restores freedom seekers role in Underground Railroad - Chicago Tribune"
Post a Comment