Alex Barse's Research

African Americans and the Road during Slavery

"The road to freedom is not straight nor smooth."-Ernest Britton

The one road that was available for African Americans during the time of slavery was the Underground Railroad. This was incredibly important for African Americans because it was the only road solely used for escaping slaves and for those who helped them. There were no "roads" to take like there were for white people of the time. While free whites could take the train to travel and go places to fulfill their dreams, escaping slaves only had that informal network of safe houses and places of refuge, and the route in between those places was extremely dangerous.

The Underground Railroad did not only represent freedom for African Americans at the time. The road was also a place of hope as well as fear. The Underground Railroad provided a hope of starting somewhere new with one's family and having a completely new life. Even though the road itself held no guarantees for freedom, it still held hope for freedom. However, with that hope came fear. There was a fear of losing one's family on the road, being caught and forced back into slavery, and even worse there was the fear of what was to come once the road ended.

That hope and that fear, however, combined to form the most important representation of the road: freedom. With the courage and determination to move past the fear and continue believing in what lied ahead, escaping slaves were able to use the road as a place of promise. Even though the road was still risky and dangerous, it was no longer the dark place it was before, because the thought of freedom gave the road light.

Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, portrays the story of a young mother escaping along the Underground Railroad and what it meant for her. The young mother, Eliza, started her journey on the road with the hope of giving her son a free and better life. Soon that hope subsided and she was faced with the realities of how dangerous the road actually was. That fear, however, was not strong enough to take away from what the road really represented and what it would eventually lead to: freedom. Freedom inspired her, as it did the other escaping slaves during that time, to keep moving and get to the end of the road.

Work Cited

Gara, Larry. The Liberty Line: the Legend of the Underground Railroad. Lexington, Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1967.

Lieberson, Stanley. A Piece of the Pie: Blacks and White Immigrants Since 1880. Los Angelos, California: University of California Press, 1980.

Maloney, Thomas N. “African American Migration to the North: New Evidence for the 1910s.” Economic Inquiry. 40.1 (January 2002): 1-11.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. New York, New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1982.

White, Debra Gray. Ar’n’t I a Woman? New York, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc, 1990.