Discussion by Maxine F. Brown at CU meeting for October 9, 2003
Fun fact: Was the Underground Railroad a real railroad?
Maxine Brown is the founder of the Leora Brown School, an 1891 one-room African American schoolhouse in Corydon, Indiana. Brown is also the co-chairperson for Indiana Freedom Trails, a voluntary group that was formed to investigate and research the Underground Railroad in Indiana. Brown is also the founder of NETWORK (New Energy to Work Out Racial Kinks), a public forum for the discussion of race. There are NETWORK programs at Indiana University Southeast, University of Louisville, and in Lexington, Kentucky. Brown is currently a consultant for the Southern Indiana Minority Enterprise Initiative, a project designed to assist women and minorities to start their own businesses.
As a student of history and preservation, Maxine Brown has been doing Underground Railroad (URR) research for five years, a difficult task because it was secret. She described some of the myths about the URR. First it was not a real railroad. Second, it was not a nationwide, centralized network. It was actually a whole series of places and people, particularly enslaved Africans themselves who were always running away. It began around 1831 when William Lloyd Garrison first published The Liberator, but it was very individualized, not structured.
In any area where there was a community of free blacks, slaves came through. For example Louisville had a large free black population side-by-side with large groups of slaves. There is not much written history of slaves fleeing through southern Indiana, but the Ohio River was very important as an escape route. We know there was collaboration between the enslaved and those opponents of slavery, but we do not have documentation. The Second Baptist Church in New Albany, as well as some local places (Bob Samples' house and Branham Tavern) have an oral history of being part of the URR but we have no written proof. We do know that a free man of color, Oswald Wright, came to Harrison County in 1829, following a couple named Bell. Wright was arrested in Brandenburg, Kentucky, with two of the Bells for helping a slave escape in 1857. Though the Bells' sons came back from California and broke them out of jail, Wright was imprisoned for at least five years in Frankfort and then returned to Corydon.
In this area, slaves came from small operations in Kentucky, particularly Meade County. In the Corydon newspaper in 1951 there was an obituary of Marinda Johnson, who had been born into slavery in 1850. She remembered her master taking away her sisters and brothers, and the threats that she could be sold to worse places, like Mississippi. Brown described how her own great-grandfather, Alfred Brown, had apparently killed an overseer to get away from slavery. She knows he was born in 1813, made it to Canada and then returned to Harrison County in 1866 and purchased 70 acres of land, and died here in 1882. His wife, Brown's great-grandmother Emaline, was a slave fathered by her owner, John Wimp, in Meade County, KY. She was included in his will as property to be given away. Though there is an 1820 Supreme Court case of a slave woman winning her freedom from her Vincennes owner, the 1850 federal Fugitive Slave Act made it all the more difficult for free blacks in Indiana.
The URR is a bright spot in this awful page of history - enslaved people did not want to accept their fate and there was a community who helped them. Another local bright spot is the story of Paul and Susanna Mitchum, who spent a lifetime acquiring slaves in order to free them. They came to Corydon with 100 slaves in 1814. Their adopted son married one of the slaves and turned the oversight of the colony to one of the freed blacks. Brown has a copy of her great-great-greatgrandmother Millie's and her five children's deed of emancipation by Paul Mitchum.
Maxine Brown said that perhaps this history will rejuvenate the local historical society. She said she would like to have everyone here ask what are our roots. "Go home and ask your grandparents what they thought of the whole (racial) issue!" Brown talked about the strange history in Indiana of slave ownership and the Ku Klux Klan. "The attitudes that came into our country with slavery are still carrying over to our time." Brown herself had heard from an African-American woman who worked briefly in Corydon and was told that someone complained about her presence - just a few months ago! "We are on the threshold of how wonderful this community can become," Brown said. "We are changing a lot. In the heart of this community is a graciousness and hospitality, but we haven't had enough experience with outsiders." She invited Community Unity to encourage schools to work harder at bringing diversity into the classroom as teachers, speakers, etc. (maybe providing a roster of speakers). Teachers need reinforcement and professional development. Brown also suggested perhaps an annual community report of diversity and/or quarterly meetings on topics, such as genealogy, in the Community Unity newsletter or the Martin Luther King discussion group. Brown herself is hoping to bring in more speakers form Louisville and IUS, such as Ed Hamilton, the sculptor of York (the slave who accompanied Lewis and Clark), Blaine Hudson, who has studied the URR in Kentucky, and members of the National Historic Trust. On November 21, 2003, at noon, at the Leora Brown School, Byron W. Woodson, Sr., a descendant of Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings will speak about his book President in the Family.
Fun fact answer: No, the "Underground Railroad" was actually an individualized, informal set of relationships. Slaves were helped to flee their masters by free blacks and slavery opponents who hid, directed and transported them along their escape to non-slaveholding states and Canada in the north.
Fun fact: Was the Underground Railroad a real railroad?
Maxine Brown is the founder of the Leora Brown School, an 1891 one-room African American schoolhouse in Corydon, Indiana. Brown is also the co-chairperson for Indiana Freedom Trails, a voluntary group that was formed to investigate and research the Underground Railroad in Indiana. Brown is also the founder of NETWORK (New Energy to Work Out Racial Kinks), a public forum for the discussion of race. There are NETWORK programs at Indiana University Southeast, University of Louisville, and in Lexington, Kentucky. Brown is currently a consultant for the Southern Indiana Minority Enterprise Initiative, a project designed to assist women and minorities to start their own businesses.
As a student of history and preservation, Maxine Brown has been doing Underground Railroad (URR) research for five years, a difficult task because it was secret. She described some of the myths about the URR. First it was not a real railroad. Second, it was not a nationwide, centralized network. It was actually a whole series of places and people, particularly enslaved Africans themselves who were always running away. It began around 1831 when William Lloyd Garrison first published The Liberator, but it was very individualized, not structured.
In any area where there was a community of free blacks, slaves came through. For example Louisville had a large free black population side-by-side with large groups of slaves. There is not much written history of slaves fleeing through southern Indiana, but the Ohio River was very important as an escape route. We know there was collaboration between the enslaved and those opponents of slavery, but we do not have documentation. The Second Baptist Church in New Albany, as well as some local places (Bob Samples' house and Branham Tavern) have an oral history of being part of the URR but we have no written proof. We do know that a free man of color, Oswald Wright, came to Harrison County in 1829, following a couple named Bell. Wright was arrested in Brandenburg, Kentucky, with two of the Bells for helping a slave escape in 1857. Though the Bells' sons came back from California and broke them out of jail, Wright was imprisoned for at least five years in Frankfort and then returned to Corydon.
In this area, slaves came from small operations in Kentucky, particularly Meade County. In the Corydon newspaper in 1951 there was an obituary of Marinda Johnson, who had been born into slavery in 1850. She remembered her master taking away her sisters and brothers, and the threats that she could be sold to worse places, like Mississippi. Brown described how her own great-grandfather, Alfred Brown, had apparently killed an overseer to get away from slavery. She knows he was born in 1813, made it to Canada and then returned to Harrison County in 1866 and purchased 70 acres of land, and died here in 1882. His wife, Brown's great-grandmother Emaline, was a slave fathered by her owner, John Wimp, in Meade County, KY. She was included in his will as property to be given away. Though there is an 1820 Supreme Court case of a slave woman winning her freedom from her Vincennes owner, the 1850 federal Fugitive Slave Act made it all the more difficult for free blacks in Indiana.
The URR is a bright spot in this awful page of history - enslaved people did not want to accept their fate and there was a community who helped them. Another local bright spot is the story of Paul and Susanna Mitchum, who spent a lifetime acquiring slaves in order to free them. They came to Corydon with 100 slaves in 1814. Their adopted son married one of the slaves and turned the oversight of the colony to one of the freed blacks. Brown has a copy of her great-great-greatgrandmother Millie's and her five children's deed of emancipation by Paul Mitchum.
Maxine Brown said that perhaps this history will rejuvenate the local historical society. She said she would like to have everyone here ask what are our roots. "Go home and ask your grandparents what they thought of the whole (racial) issue!" Brown talked about the strange history in Indiana of slave ownership and the Ku Klux Klan. "The attitudes that came into our country with slavery are still carrying over to our time." Brown herself had heard from an African-American woman who worked briefly in Corydon and was told that someone complained about her presence - just a few months ago! "We are on the threshold of how wonderful this community can become," Brown said. "We are changing a lot. In the heart of this community is a graciousness and hospitality, but we haven't had enough experience with outsiders." She invited Community Unity to encourage schools to work harder at bringing diversity into the classroom as teachers, speakers, etc. (maybe providing a roster of speakers). Teachers need reinforcement and professional development. Brown also suggested perhaps an annual community report of diversity and/or quarterly meetings on topics, such as genealogy, in the Community Unity newsletter or the Martin Luther King discussion group. Brown herself is hoping to bring in more speakers form Louisville and IUS, such as Ed Hamilton, the sculptor of York (the slave who accompanied Lewis and Clark), Blaine Hudson, who has studied the URR in Kentucky, and members of the National Historic Trust. On November 21, 2003, at noon, at the Leora Brown School, Byron W. Woodson, Sr., a descendant of Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings will speak about his book President in the Family.
Fun fact answer: No, the "Underground Railroad" was actually an individualized, informal set of relationships. Slaves were helped to flee their masters by free blacks and slavery opponents who hid, directed and transported them along their escape to non-slaveholding states and Canada in the north.