Taking Liberties By Rewriting History: About the Blacks and the Underground Railroad

 Nadene Goldfoot                                         

I guess I'm a purist when it comes to history.  I want true facts, not adulterated altered facts to suit someone's feelings.  I was looking forward to a pretty literal movie about the Underground Railroad, something I've known about for a long time and had recently researched again.  I didn't get it at all with Prime Time's Amazon showing of UNDERGROUND RAILROAD.  

From Academy Award® winner Barry Jenkins and based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead, "The Underground Railroad" is a new series that chronicles Cora Randall’s desperate bid for freedom in the Antebellum South. After escaping a Georgia plantation for the rumored Underground Railroad, Cora discovers no mere metaphor, but an actual railroad beneath the Southern soil.

They actually showed a real train in a very deep underground hole in the ground.  There was no railroad in this history, though they used the name, meaning another type of railroad.

The idea was from a book by Colson Whitehead, "Underground Railroad." "The Underground Railroad" is about a slave named Cora who grows up on a Georgia plantation and, at the age of 15, escapes through the Underground Railroad. 

The Underground Railroad, in Whitehead's reimagining, is literally a railroad with underground tracks and locomotives making stops in different states. That's one of many liberties Colson takes with the real past. Reviewing the book in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani described it as a potent, almost hallucinatory novel that leaves the reader with a devastating understanding of the terrible human costs of slavery. I felt the same way after viewing season 1 in that it was hallucinatory.  

Whitehead has told a story essential to our understanding of the American past and the American present."  I would disagree with this completely.  It was a confused patchwork quilt of pictures and words, not telling the history accurately at all, leaving me confused.  

The movie has 10 seasons, but I thought it was completely finished at the end of the 1st, because the listing of characters and people came up as it usually does at the end of a movie.  I was just too stunned after watched this version of an important episode in our history, and up came season 2. 

I haven't minded a little added flavor spiking up a history.  There are some things that can be added that could have happened and do not deviate from the character of the people to make it interesting.  Who didn't like THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, or CLEOPATRA, but this is not a legitimate alteration.  Children watching should come out of it knowing a garbled set of events that have nothing to do with reality.  

Before anyone watches this, I certainly hope they do some real reading about the Underground Railroad, and how it helped get Blacks out of the South and into the North, including Canada. As for me, on with something else. 

I've watched lots of movies, series, whatever on Netflix and other places that were pretty mindless, but never felt the need to complain.  This was about history.  When people feel that they can take liberties and change a people's history, that's going too far, no matter how clever they seem to be.  Whether in school or in entertainment, people deserve to be told the truth about  one's history.       

book, https://www.npr.org/transcripts/489168232

Vermont and the Underground Railroad, Quaker Advocates Against Slavery But For BDS Against Israel

 Nadene Goldfoot                                         

  The Rokeby Museum about the Underground Railroad in Ferrisburg, Addison, Vermont--most freedom seekers that came to Rokeby simply met someone that knew the Rowland and Rebecca Robinsons who were Quakers. Vermont's Constitution was the first in the country to abolish slavery, and many Vermonters assisted runaway slaves throughout the pre-Civil War period

If you’re a black person and you’re living in Vermont in the 1790s, you could own property, you could take a white person to court, but at the very same time, you could be kidnapped or re-enslaved.”

Professor Harvey Amani Whitfield of U. of Vermont wrote a book about this, called The Problem of Slavery in Early Vermont, 1777-1810. It came out in 2014. During a VPR interview he did in January of that year, Amani said that even though abolition was enshrined in Vermont’s constitution, “it wasn’t enforced. Owners of slaves just sort of subverted it, ignored it.”

Plus, there was a loophole that allowed people to continue to enslave children. Amani found examples of this kind of stuff all the way up to 1810. So that’s one thing: Slavery had a foothold here. Another thing to know is that Vermonters had complicated views about all this. Here’s Vermont historian Ray Zirblis:

“Lots of people, I think, of good will in the antebellum period are on the fence. Slavery is reprehensible, but the destruction of the union would be a terrible outcome. So people we would consider, they would say, ‘gentlemen of property and standing,’ upstanding members of the community, are very often on the side of a more temperant middle ground.”     

My Robinsons lived in Windsor and Orange Counties, Vermont, neighbors of Addison.  

This is not my family of Robinsons but another from England who settled in Rhode Island and were Quakers, They trace back to Rowland Robinson b: 1754 from Cumberland, England.  They came close to mine, living in Ferrisburgh, Addison, Vermont.

Jane Williamson, the director of Rokeby Museum of Ferrisburgh, Addison, Vermont  in Shelburne of the Shelburne Museum tells that Rokeby was the home and sheep farm of the Robinson family, who were Quakers.  Shelburne Museum is a museum of art, design, and Americana located in Shelburne, Chittenden, Vermont, United States. Over 150,000 works are exhibited in 39 exhibition buildings, 25 of which are historic and were relocated to the museum grounds. It is located on 45 acres (18 ha) near Lake Champlain.   

Thomas Robinson, a Newport Quaker merchant, was a key advocate for abolition of slavery both within and outside of the Society of Friends from the 1770s. As a young man starting out in business in the 1750s, however, Robinson sent a number of ships to Africa to procure slaves for sale in the West Indies, stopping the practice just as the Quaker community came to prohibit the trade among its members. Robinson’s father, Deputy Governor William Robinson, owned a large slave-worked plantation in South County. Robinson’s father-in-law, colony Treasurer and Newport merchant Thomas Richardson, also held slaves, and served as Presiding Clerk of New England Yearly Meeting of Friends from 1729 to 1760.  

Robinson’s shift from slave-trader to abolitionist provides a lens for looking at how and why the Quaker community, after tolerating slave-holding and even slave-trading among its members for 100 years, came to view slave-trading and slave-owning as contrary to their Christian testimony. The talk about it was held on March 9, 2011 saying that it would draw on the extensive Robinson and Richardson family papers held by the Newport Historical Society, as well as Quaker meeting records, probate documents, and genealogical materials.                                  

This is the son of the abolitionist, Rowland Thomas Robinson.  It's Roland Evans Robinson the famous artist born in 1833.  American farmer, artist, and author. He is best known as the author of several novels and short stories that captured details about life in rural Vermont, including attitudes towards Native Americans, African Americans, and foreigners, as well as the pre-Civil War regional differences of the northern and southern states.

Four generations of the family lived on this property; one of those generations featured a husband and wife named Rowland and Rachel. They were abolitionists, and they sheltered or aided dozens of fugitive slaves here on the farm in the 1830s and ‘40s.     Descendants of ROLAND Thomas and Rachel Robinson, Quakers

1   ROLAND Thomas Robinson b: September 21, 1796 in Ferrisburg, Addison, Vermont d: August 25, 1879 in Ferrisburg, Addison, Vermont Age at death: 82

. +Rachel b: October 01, 1799 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania d: February 03, 1862 in Ferrisburg, Addison, Vermont Age at death: 62

.. 2   Thomas Richardson Robinson b: 1822 in Ferrisburg, Addison, Vermont d: October 24, 1854 in Ferrisburg, Addison, Vermont Age at death: 32 est.

...... +Charlotte Satterley b: in Ferrisburg, Addison, Vermont d: in Agawam, Massachusetts

....... 3   William Gilpin Robinson b: November 28, 1850 in Ferrisburg, Addison, Vermont d: March 01, 1905 in East Freetown, Bristol, Massachusetts Age at death: 54

.. 2   George Gilpin Robinson b: March 05, 1825 in Ferrisburg, Addison, Vermont d: November 03, 1894 in Ferrisburg, Addison, Vermont Age at death: 69

.. 2   Anne Henry Minturn Robinson b: March 04, 1827 in Ferrisburg, Addison, Vermont d: May 08, 1917 in shoreham, Addison, Vermont Age at death: 90

...... +Lloyd Minturn

....... 3   Rowland R. Minturn b: 1848 in New York d: April 07, 1898 in Green Bay, Wisconsin Age at death: 50 est.

.......... +Charlotte Birgitt b: 1858 in Ohio

.. 2   Rowland Evans Robinson b: May 1833 in Ferrisburg, Addison, Vermont d: October 15, 1900 in Ferrisburg, Addison, Vermont Age at death: 67 est.

...... +Anna Stevens b: August 25, 1841 in Montpelier, Washington, Vermont d: August 02, 1925 in Ferrisburg, Addison, Vermont Age at death: 83

....... 3   Rachel Robinson b: July 28, 1878 in Ferrisburg, Addison, Vermont d: February 12, 1919 in Manhattan, New York Age at death: 40

.......... +Robert France Elmer b: July 30, 1871 in New York d: November 16, 1936 in Bronx, New York m: October 17, 1911 in Ferrisburg, Addison, Vermont Age at death: 65 m: October 17, 1911 in Ferrisburg, Addison, Vermont

....... 3   Rowland Thomas Robinson b: 1882

....... 3   Mary Robinson b: 1884

Rokeby’s connection to the Underground Railroad is so legit that the museum is a National Historic Landmark. But Jane says that people come here looking for a different story than the one the museum actually tells.

“The lantern in the window, the hidden room, the loose floorboard,” Jane says. She adds that people are kind of obsessed with hiding places — like in Brandon — because there’s this popular image of slave-catchers prowling around the countryside, looking for fugitives. But there’s no evidence that that happened in Vermont. We’re too far north.

The Quaker movement to help the Blacks was a wonderful move.  Today, their zeal has gone into helping the Palestinians in the BDS movement which is against Jews and Israel. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is a Palestinian-led movement promoting boycotts, divestments, and economic sanctions against Israel.  This goes against helping a worthwhile cause by aiding and abetting their enemy, Hamas Terrorists,  who lead the Palestinians in Gaza. 

Caption: BDS supporters hold a protest against Israel in South Africa's Gauteng province recently

(photo credit: BDS SOUTH AFRICA)

Quaker support for BDS is long standing and deeply founded in the denomination’s history. Since the 1960s, we have seen the growth of “scholar warriors” who have given up the ideal of impartial scholarship for activism. As Quakerism is about doing rather than praying, their institutions created mission-oriented avenues that are today chiefly focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 

And when it comes to Jews, the Quakers increasingly share the supersessionist theology of some American Protestant denominations, a theological justification for deemphasizing the Jewish connection to the Holy Land and deriding the Jews as a people forsaken by God.

 Zionism presented a direct challenge to supersessionist theology, and many Protestant missionary and aid groups in the Middle East opposed the movement and supported Arab nationalism.

 The Quakers, for the most part, stayed neutral on the subject, although Quaker institutions in Palestine itself and individual Palestinian Quakers became leading advocates of Arab nationalism and fervent anti-Zionists.                             

The Muslims decided in 1967, after their attempt to wipe out Israel in their 3rd war against Israel and losing, to never have peace with this small Jewish state.  The 1967 Arab League summit was held on August 29 in Khartoum as the fourth Arab League Summit in the aftermath of the Arab defeat by Israel in the Six-Day War, and is famous for its Khartoum Resolution known as "The Three No's"; No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel.          

The Abraham peace accords are changing that with over 4 countries signing on and being at peace, joining Egypt and Jordan as well as planning programs together.  The BDS movement and the Quakers have not succeeded in driving Israel into the sea.  

Resource:

https://wwwrobinsongenealogy.blogspot.com/2010/10/it-was-said-that-most-of-rhode-island.html

https://rokeby.org/about/the-robinson-family/

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/quaker-activists-584222

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boycott,_Divestment_and_Sanctions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Arab_League_summit#:~:text=The%201967%20Arab%20League%20summit,Israel%2C%20no%20negotiations%20with%20Israel.

When Two Jews Were Murdered With Black Civil Right Advocate

 Nadene Goldfoot                                           

Two Jewish young men who were activists in the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s were murdered because they were helping their Black friends in the cause of the Blacks.  "The murders of  Goodman,  Schwerner and Chaney,, also known as the Freedom Summer murders, the Mississippi civil rights workers' murders or the Mississippi Burning murders, refers to three activists who were abducted and murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in June 1964 during the Civil Rights Movement.

 The victims were Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner from New York City, and James Chaney from Meridian, Mississippi . All three were associated with the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) and its member organization, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). They had been working with the Freedom Summer campaign by attempting to register African Americans in Mississippi to vote.  They were but  only a few of the many Jews who were helping Blacks during this period. 

                                            

   born November 1943, killed June 21, 1964 at age 20 by KKK

In 1964, Andrew Goodman, recruited by John Lewis, volunteered along with fellow activists Michael Schwerner, his wife Rita Schwerner Bender, and James Chaney to work on the "Freedom Summer" project of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to register black people to vote in Mississippi.  Goodman left New York to train and develop civil rights strategies at Western College for Women (now part of Miami University) in Oxford, Ohio. In mid-June, Goodman joined Schwerner in Meridian, Mississippi, where the latter was designated head of the field office. They worked in rural areas on registering blacks to vote.

Andrew Goodman's family and community were steeped in intellectual and socially progressive activism and were devoted to social justice. An activist at an early age, Goodman graduated from the progressive Walden School, which was said to have had a strongly formative influence on his outlook

Civil rights activists were resented and held under suspicion by white Mississippians. Spies paid by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a taxpayer-funded agency, kept track of all northerners and suspected activists. The Commission conducted economic boycotts and intimidation against activists. In 1998 its records were opened by court order, revealing the state's deep complicity in the 1964 murders of three civil right workers because its investigator, A. L. Hopkins, passed on information about the workers, including their car license number, to the Commission. Records showed the Commission passed the information on to the Sheriff of Neshoba County, who was implicated in the murders.

                                           

      Born November 1939, killed in Mississippi by KKK at age 25

In the early 1960s, Michael Schwerner became active in working for civil rights for African Americans; he led a local Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) group on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, called "Downtown CORE." He participated in a 1963 effort to desegregate Gwynn Oak Amusement Park in Maryland. The Ku Klux Klan targeted Schwerner after he and his wife, Rita, had taken over the Meridian CORE field office, where they established a community center for blacks as part of grassroots organizing. Schwerner tried to establish contact with white working-class citizens of Meridian and went door-to-door to speak with them. He also organized a black boycott of a popular variety store until it hired its first African American, under the principle of "don't shop where you can't work".

Born  May 1943, James Cheney was 21 when killed 

In 1964, James Cheney, a Black Catholic,  met with leaders of the Mt. Nebo Baptist Church to gain their support for letting Michael Schwerner, CORE's local leader, come to address the church members, to encourage them to use the church for voter education and registration. Chaney also acted as a liaison with other CORE members.  In 1962, Chaney participated in a Freedom Ride from Tennessee to Greenville, Mississippi, and in another from Greenville to Meridian. He and his younger brother participated in other non-violent demonstrations, as well. James Chaney started volunteering in late 1963, and joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Meridian. He organized voter education classes, introduced CORE workers to local church leaders, and helped CORE workers get around the counties.

                                                 

              1930s picture of Klu Klux Klan

The Klu Klux Klan is the main group against Black freedom.  It's still active.  The Ku Klux Klan, with its long history of violence, is the oldest and most infamous of American hate groups. Although Black Americans have typically been the Klan’s primary target, it also has attacked Jews, immigrants, members of the LGBTQ community and, until recently, Catholics.In the past few years, the Ku Klux Klan experienced a drop in the number of active chapters. Unlike years past, however, this downward trajectory was partially impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

 Since 1890 and through the turn of the century, southern states had systematically disenfranchised most black voters by discrimination in voter registration and voting."

The 1960's was the era of an awakened Civil Rights Movement that had been denied the Blacks of the United States.  The Civil War had been fought from April 12, 1861 to April 9, 1865, 4 bloody years where brother found he was fighting his brother in the idea of freeing Blacks from slavery. It took 100 years for Americans to actually become aware of the plight of Blacks, and for the Blacks to find people to aid and abet them in this cause.                         

 The American Civil War was a civil war in the United States fought between the Union and the Confederacy, or the North against the South. The central cause of the war was the status of slavery, especially the expansion of slavery into territories acquired as a result of the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican–American War.  The end result of this war was the :

(1)  Dissolution of the Confederate States, (2)  U.S. territorial integrity preserved, (3) Slavery abolished, (4) Beginning of the Reconstruction era, (5) Passage and ratification of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution of the United States, and (6) awareness of the wrongs of slavery and discriminating people for their differences.  

                                             

           1859 poster  for speaker speaking against slavery-Reverend William King (Clayton) in Harriet Beecher Stowe's "DRED." He turns out to be similar in character to Martin Luther King's ggrandfather.  

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s maternal great-grandfather, Willis Williams, who was born in 1810, was described as “an old slavery time preacher” and an “exhorter” (Papers 1:1). In 1846, when Willis joined Shiloh Baptist Church in Greene County, Georgia, its congregation numbered 50 white and 28 black members, with African Americans actively participating in church affairs and serving on church committees. In 1855 nearly a hundred blacks joined the congregation, including 15-year-old Lucrecia (or Creecy) Daniel. She and Willis were married in the late 1850s or early 1860s, and she bore him five children, including Adam Daniel (A. D.) Williams, King, Jr.’s grandfather. The family left Shiloh Baptist Church when it, like other southern congregations, divided along racial lines at the end of the Civil War.                                      

One cannot forget the Underground Railroad, however, as the 1st act in aiding Blacks in their grief as being last in the world of being freed from slavery since Great Britain had acted earlier without having to have a Civil War to do it. In 1806-07, with the abolition campaign gaining further momentum,  legislation was finally passed in both the Commons and the Lords which brought an end to Britain's involvement in the trade. The bill received royal assent in March and the trade was made illegal from 1 May 1807. 

The Underground Railroad was a secret network of abolitionists (people who wanted to abolish slavery). They helped African Americans escape from enslavement in the American South to free Northern states or to Canada. The Underground Railroad was the largest anti-slavery freedom movement in North America. It brought between 30,000 and 40,000 fugitives to British North America (now Canada).        

August and Henrietta Bondi’s Jewish home was a stop for slaves fleeing North.  One important stop on the Underground Railroad was the home of a Jewish couple, August and Henrietta Bondi, in Greeley, Kansas. Their home became a refuge for an unknown number of slaves, and the Bondis worked tirelessly, as Jews, to oppose the horror of slavery.  As pro-slavery zealots attacked anti-slavery activists, August joined with other anti-slavery activists in the Battle of Black Jack, on June 2, 1856. Anti-slavery forces captured 48 “Border Ruffians” who’d been menacing and attacking anti-slavery Kansans. (August fought alongside the notorious anti-slavery figure John Brown. John Brown was later shot for treason.  
         

Our 3 Civil Rights advocates had traveled from Meridian to the community of Longdale to talk with congregation members at a black church that had been burned; the church had been a center of community organization.           

The trio was arrested following a traffic stop for speeding outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, escorted to the local jail, and held for a number of hours. As the three left town in their car, they were followed by law enforcement and others.                  

                       Execution as in previous days of Civil War

Before leaving Neshoba County, their car was pulled over. The three were abducted, driven to another location, and shot to death at close range. The three men's bodies were taken to an earthen dam where they were buried.

The disappearance of the three men was initially investigated as a missing persons case. The civil rights workers' burnt-out car was found near a swamp three days after their disappearance. An extensive search of the area was conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), local and state authorities, and four hundred United States Navy sailors.

                                           

 The three men's bodies were not discovered until two months later, when the team received a tip. During the investigation it emerged that members of the local White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the Neshoba County Sheriff's Office, and the Philadelphia Police Department were involved in the incident.           

     

The murder of the activists sparked national outrage and an extensive federal investigation, filed as Mississippi Burning  (MIBURN), which later became the title of a 1988 film loosely based on the events starring Gene Hackman. In 1967, after the state government refused to prosecute, the United States federal government charged eighteen individuals with civil rights violations. Seven were convicted and received relatively minor sentences for their actions. Outrage over the activists' disappearances helped gain passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

                                                  

Edgar Ray Killen (January 17, 1925 – January 11, 2018) was a Ku Klux Klan organizer who planned and directed the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, three civil rights activists participating in the Freedom Summer of 1964. He was found guilty in state court of three counts of manslaughter on June 21, 2005, the forty-first anniversary of the crime, and sentenced to 60 years in prison. He appealed the verdict, but the sentence was upheld on April 12, 2007, by the Supreme Court of Mississippi. He died in prison on January 11, 2018, six days before his 93rd birthday.   

"Forty-one years after the murders took place, one perpetrator, Edgar Ray Killen, was charged by the state of Mississippi for his part in the crimes.  On June 20, 2016, federal and state authorities officially closed the case, ending the possibility of further prosecution. Killen died in prison in January 2018."  Since he was tried 41 years after the fact, he only had to serve the last 13 years of his life in prison.  

Resource:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Goodman_(activist)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Schwerner

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Chaney

https://www.aish.com/jw/s/Jewish-Conductor-on-the-Underground-Railroad.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War

https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/underground-railroad

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Ray_Killen

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/ku-klux-klan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Chaney

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred:_A_Tale_of_the_Great_Dismal_Swamp