A thoughtful and illuminating bicycle journey along the Underground
Railroad by a climate scientist seeking to engage with American
history. The traces of the Underground Railroad hide in plain
sight: a great church in Philadelphia; a humble old house backing
up to the New Jersey Turnpike; an industrial outbuilding in Ohio.
Over the course of four years, David Goodrich rode his bicycle
3,000 miles east of the Mississippi to travel the routes of the
Underground Railroad and delve into the history and stories in the
places where they happened. He followed the most famous of
conductors, Harriet Tubman, from where she was enslaved in
Maryland, on the eastern shore, all the way to her family sanctuary
at a tiny chapel in Ontario, Canada. Travelling South, he rode from
New Orleans, where the enslaved were bought and sold, through
Mississippi and the heart of the Delta Blues. As we pedal along
with him, Goodrich brings us to the Borderland along the Ohio
River, a kind of no-mans-land between North and South in the years
before the Civil War. Here, slave hunters roamed both banks of the
river, trying to catch people as they fled for freedom. We travel
to Oberlin, Ohio, a town that staunchly defended freedom seekers,
embodied in the life of Lewis Leary, who was lost in the fires of
Harpers Ferry, but his spirit was reborn in the Harlem Renaissance.
On Freedom Road enables us to see familiar places-New York and
Philadelphia, New Orleans and Buffalo-in a very different light:
from the vantage point of desperate people seeking to outrun the
reach of slavery. Join in this journey to find the heroes and
stories, both known and hidden, of the Underground Railroad.
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