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.

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.