Brain Games
FUGITIVE SLAVES William and Eliza Parker were operating a safe house in Christiana, Penn., when on Sept. 11, 1851, Edward Gorsuch, a slave master, came calling with a U.S. marshal and about 20 men looking for four runaway slaves. “The runaways were there, but my great-great-grandparents refused to hand them over,” explains Frank Parker, an automobile mechanic and life-long resident of North Buxton, Ont. “During the resistance, Gorsuch was killed and several of the marshal’s men were wounded. Arrests were made, but William and Eliza and a few others involved in the riot escaped and settled in the Elgin/Buxton Settlement in Ontario. When abolitionist John Brown visited Buxton looking for men and money for his raid on Harper’s Ferry, W.V., he wrote, ‘In Buxton, I found the man equal to 10 men.’ Some historians believe he was referring to my great-great grandfather.”
Parker’s family history is one of many that are part of a photographic exhibit entitled North Is Freedom: The Legacy of the Underground Railroad, on display at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C. from Sept. 22 until the New Year. It is the work of legendary Canadian-Slovakian photographer Yuri Dojc, 70, whose work has included chronicling Slovakia’s last-living Holocaust survivors; portraits of Second World War veterans and their families; and genocide survivors in Rwanda.
The exhibit is in honour of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opens on Sept. 24 in America’s capital with a ribbon-cutting ceremony with U.S. President Barack Obama. An initiative of the Smithsonian Institution, the new museum takes pride of place on the National Mall.
“Our roots and the price our ancestors paid to secure our freedom must always be remembered and celebrated,” says Blaine Courtney, chair of the Owen Sound Emancipation Festival, founded in 1862, the longest continually running celebration of its kind in North America. His brother, Brent, was the first black police officer hired by the Waterloo Police Department in 1971, and Brent’s daughter, Robbin, is an apiarist in Owen Sound, Ont .“We are descended from Abraham Courtney, a slave who escaped from Georgia and in 1861 or 1862 settled in Owen Sound, considered the northern terminus of the Underground Railroad,” Blaine adds. “While there are no details of his journey, 10 years later the census lists him as age 50, married with five children. By 1881, there are nine children, the youngest a boy named Jacob, our grandfather and Robbin’s great-great-grandfather.”
For Darryl Hogan, a computer software architect from Windsor and vice-president of the board of the Amherstburg Freedom Museum, his ancestor’s escape to Canada is equally compelling. On Dec. 20, 1858, 11 slaves in Missouri were rescued by a raiding party led by the abolitionist John Brown. Two of those slaves, Sam and Jane Harper, were Hogan’s third great-grandparents. For two months, the escaped slaves and their rescuers made their way through Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa and, after travelling through Illinois and Michigan, Sam and Jane crossed on the ferry from Detroit into Windsor, on March 12, 1859. “My ancestors’ story provides examples of both the worst and best in humanity,” Hogan says. “It also proves that oppression can be overcome.”
For some, such detailed accounts don’t exist, yet that doesn’t lessen the poignancy of what their ancestors endured. “We know very little about our great-grandfathers,” says Brenda Lambkin. “Robert Dudley was enslaved, but there are no records or stories of how he came to Canada.” Her husband, Rev. Albert Lambkin is pastor of the First Baptist Church in Chatham; she is a museum assistant at Uncle Tom’s Cabin Historic Site in Dresden, Ont.
“During my early years, no one spoke of family history,” says Wilma Morrison, who lives in Niagara Falls, Ont. “All older friends or relatives were referred to as aunt or uncle, and now that family has passed, the story has gone as well.” While her own history is lost, Morrison has spent much of her life preserving the black history of the Niagara region, including helping to save the historic Nathaniel Dett Memorial BME Church and establishing the Norval Johnson Library, which houses a major collection of black history and literature.
Adds Pamella Houston, a sales co-ordinator at the Ontario Black History Society, whose great-greatgrandfather, John Green, settled in Owen Sound after fleeing Baltimore in 1856 following a quarrel with his owner and fearful of being beaten or sold, “I feel my ancestors watching me, and they are proud to see their descendants tell their story.”