Run It Back offers carefully researched articles on lesser told parts of black history. But I’m only able to do this work with your help. Please consider getting a paid subscription to Run It Back to help me keep writing these stories and making them widely available to students, educators and lifelong learners.

Subscribe now

It felt like a homecoming. Thousands of onlookers cheered wildly as daredevil pilot Bessie Coleman arced her Curtiss Jenny biplane into a spiral above a Houston field. The weather was scorching, but Coleman kept her cool as she cruised through loop-de-loops and gunned across the blue skies at 75 miles per hour. The aviator was already a colossal figure to many in the audience. In recent years, her globe-trotting escapades had taken her to Los Angeles, Chicago, Paris, Amsterdam and beyond. The Chicago Defender had declared her the “Queen of the Air.” Now, back home in Texas on June 19, 1925, she was finally achieving her true aerial ambitions, as a main attraction in the first-ever all-Black air show in the state—and doing it on Juneteenth, no less. “I am a native Texan,” she told a newspaper reporter, “and proud that a Texan is the only Negro aviatrix in the world.”

While the Tuskegee Airmen have become icons in the history of American aviation, fewer people know the story of Bessie Coleman, the Black pilot who charted a course for them and many others in the 1920s. Known as “Brave Bessie” or “Queen Bess,” Coleman boasted a fearlessness that made her a perfect fit for a Juneteenth celebration. The holiday got its start in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865, when enslaved African Americans learned of their freedom following the Civil War. Coleman, herself born to sharecropper parents in slavery’s shadow, took that promise of freedom airborne. The Juneteenth show in Texas was the culmination of an unlikely rise, literally to the clouds, for a Black woman whose courage still astounds a century later.

Coleman was born in 1892 in Atlanta, Texas, and moved to the town of Waxahachie when she was a toddler, according to her biographer Doris L. Rich. Her father, who was part Native American, left the family for Oklahoma when Bessie was young. Money was tight, and education was hard to come by. Coleman picked cotton for months each year; after the eighth grade, she worked as a washerwoman and watched over her younger sisters. Still, she yearned for more.

When her older brother invited her to come live with him on Chicago’s South Side, she leapt at the chance. She went to beauty school in the city and soon became a manicurist. Pretty and quick-witted, Coleman preferred to work at barbershops, where she would charm male customers for generous tips and provide manicures to proud patrons in the front window. She also befriended Robert Abbott, the founder and publisher of the Chicago Defender, the nation’s leading Black newspaper, who would become a valued mentor. A Defender news item in 1918 praised her as a “shining example” of a “progressive up-to-date young woman.”

But Coleman was not content to be a window prize. One day, her older brother John, a World War I veteran, came into the barbershop and proclaimed that Black women would never be able to fly airplanes. Coleman took the insult as a challenge and soon began researching where she could pursue training. She found that no white pilots in the area were willing to teach her. Military training was also a non-starter, since the U.S. Army Air Service (a forerunner to the Air Force) did not accept women. So Coleman expanded her vision. She began studying French and saving money for a passage to Europe, where women pilots were not so disdained. Abbott, reportedly keen to mine Black success stories to help sell newspapers, urged her on and even provided financial backing. On November 20, 1920, at the age of 28, Coleman embarked on the SS Imperator for France. She would train at the École d’Aviation des Frères Caudron at Le Crotoy, one of France’s most prestigious flight schools.

Coleman spent seven months learning loop-de-loops and banking turns in a Nieuport 82, a French biplane used for training. The planes were rickety contraptions with no brakes that belched castor oil and had to be dragged to a stop with a tail skid after landing. Every pilot knew how dangerous flying was, and Coleman herself watched a classmate die in an accident while training in France. But she was determined to prove that she—and people who looked like her—could conquer this new frontier. “I thought it my duty to risk my life to learn aviating and to encourage flying among men and women of the Race,” she said. “I made up my mind to try; I tried and was successful.”

In June 1921, Coleman received her license from the renowned Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, becoming the first Black woman to earn the distinction. The license granted her the ability to fly anywhere in the world. Word of Coleman’s unusual achievement soon reached the States. When she returned to America in September 1921, she became a full-blown celebrity. A gaggle of reporters awaited her arrival in New York on the SS Manchuria. A series of profiles in the Chicago Defender soon followed. When she attended a popular Broadway musical in Manhattan, the cast presented Coleman with an engraved silver cup, and the multiracial (but segregated) audience gave her a standing ovation.

Still, Coleman remained focused on her craft. Soon she was back in Europe, gaining more aerial training from leading aircraft experts in Amsterdam and Berlin. In the late summer of 1922, when she again returned to the States, she began conducting flying circuses in New York and Chicago and at various state fairs. Thousands of fans attended the events, which often cost between a quarter and 75 cents per head (around $14 today) and sometimes included a chance for attendees to go airborne themselves, with Coleman piloting. Her stylish clothes enhanced her showmanship. Her typical uniform was a custom leather coat, shiny boots and a leather helmet and goggles.

Coleman took her responsibility as a Black role model seriously. She hoped to launch a flight school to train Black pilots, especially women. She refused to perform for whites-only audiences, and while her shows often had segregated seating, she wouldn’t allow venues to force her Black fans to come through a separate entrance. A movie in which she was set to star fell apart when she got hold of the script and saw that she’d be portraying an ignorant, poverty-stricken Black woman. “No Uncle Tom stuff for me!” she told the film’s manager as she walked out on her contract.

But even with the glamour of celebrity, making a living was a constant challenge. As a member of an ensemble in her early aerial shows, she rarely raked in major profits. Planes were expensive, so she typically borrowed one from a local pilot for her shows. When she finally purchased her own plane in 1923, she crashed it in California on the way to a performance. The accident put her in the hospital for three months with fractured ribs and a broken leg. From her hospital bed, she insisted her career wasn’t over. “Tell them all that as soon as I can walk I’m going to fly!” she wrote in a telegram to well-wishers.

After her injury, Coleman struggled to book gigs and cycled through a series of dubious managers. In Texas, though, things finally started to turn back around. She found fresh income by lecturing on her European exploits, which only boosted fans’ eagerness to see her take to the skies. The Juneteenth 1925 festivities cemented her comeback. When Coleman returned to the ground, one reporter observed, “more than a dozen pairs of hands were outstretched to help her from the machine.” For the rest of the summer, Coleman toured around Texas, even performing in Waxahachie, the town where she’d grown up. At one show she did a “wing walk,” stepping out onto the wing of the plane while airborne and leaping down into the crowd via parachute. She was invited to meet with Miriam Ferguson, the state’s first woman governor, at the Texas governor’s mansion. Coleman was planning to transition away from daredevil stunts and toward speaking and building her flight school for Black pilots.

Less than a year later, however, tragedy struck. In April 1926, Coleman and another pilot named William Wills were conducting an aerial survey of an airfield in Jacksonville, Florida, where Coleman was prepping her next big show. At about 3,500 feet, Wills lost control of the plane, and the aircraft flipped upside-down. Coleman fell out of her seat and plummeted to her death; Wills died when the plane crashed into a nearby farm. Investigators later found that a wrench had jammed the plane’s control gears; rumors swirled that someone had sabotaged Coleman, but no further evidence of foul play ever emerged. Freak accidents were unfortunately common in the early days of aviation.

Coleman’s death had the weight of a national tragedy, at least in Black America. More than 5,000 people attended her memorial service in Jacksonville. In Chicago, where Coleman had first pursued her dream of becoming a pilot, 10,000 mourners honored her coffin ahead of her funeral at Pilgrim Baptist Church. Congressman Oscar De Priest and civil rights activist Ida B. Wells participated in the homegoing ceremonies. The Defender published several obituaries, mournful but proud. Coleman’s eyes, one article reflected, were always “fixed on the stars.”

Coleman was just 34 when she died, never achieving her lifelong dream of training a new generation of Black pilots. But her legacy as an aviator would touch many lives. Just three years after her death, a Los Angeles-based pilot and aviation entrepreneur named William Powell formed a flight school called the Bessie Coleman Aero Club. Among the group’s members was James Banning, who in 1932 made history with Thomas C. Allen, becoming the first Black pilots to conduct a transcontinental flight. In 1934, when Powell published a book about his own aerial exploits, he dedicated it to Coleman, who had “displayed courage equal to that of the most daring men.”

Over the ensuing decades, Coleman’s legend quietly grew. When astronaut Mae Jemison became the first African American woman to travel to space, she carried a photograph of Coleman with her. Coleman also inspired Jesse L. Brown, the first African American pilot to complete Navy flight training. And this summer, Coleman will be featured in the renewed “Pioneers of Flight” gallery at the newly renovated Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, celebrating her role as a groundbreaking aviator and a thrilling barnstormer.

“Do you know you have never lived until you have flown?” she mused once. “Of course, it takes one with courage, nerve and ambition.”

From SMITHSONIAN Magazine June 2025

Subscribe now

There’s speaking truth to power, and then there’s David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. Walker, a free black man in Boston, published an 88-page abolitionist broadside in 1829 against slavery, white supremacy, and the rotten hypocrisy of American Christianity. Before Douglass or Du Bois or Malcolm X, Walker launched a rhetorical war on the American project, contrasting the democratic ideals of the Founding Fathers with the savagery of the slave system they allowed to propagate in the new republic.

Walker’s words were radical for their time, or any time. But they were not out of step with how many black people likely felt as their rights were stripped away in the early 1800’s and enslavement became increasingly brutal. “You are not astonished at my saying we hate you,” he wrote in one passage addressing white America, “for if we are men we cannot but hate you, while you are treating us like dogs.”1

“The whites want slaves, and want us for their slaves, but some of them will curse the day they ever saw us,” he vowed later in the Appeal. “As true as the sun ever shone in its meridian splendor, my colour will root some of them out of the very face of the earth.”2

The entire treatise unfurls at this register, pinballing between points with a tactical recklessness (think Tupac’s Hit Em Up for the antebellum era). Walker predicted he would be censored or even killed for his words. But beyond the fiery rhetoric, the core of Walker’s argument was this: Black Americans had been wronged more than any other group in the history of the world under the U.S. slave system, and if they were not freed immediately, the comeuppance for white Americans would be Biblical.

—

David Walker grew up near slavery but not under it. Born in Wilmington, North Carolina around 1796, he was one of only a handful of free black people living in the coastal town at the turn of the 19th century. From a young age he observed enslaved people working as sailors and lumberers, keeping the port city’s economy afloat while receiving nothing in return. He learned early that black people could perform just as competently as their white peers.3

In the late 1810’s he moved to Charleston, which had one of the largest free black populations in the South.4 While he was living there, an African Methodist Episcopal minister named Denmark Vesey laid out an elaborate plan to raid Charleston’s weapons arsenal, murder local whites and set the city ablaze in a mass slave rebellion. Vesey’s plot was foiled before it could begin when some co-conspirators tipped off local authorities, and he was soon executed.5 It’s unclear whether Walker was involved with the Vesey affair, but he’d ultimately come to advocate for armed resistance to enslavement in his writings.

Walker soon relocated to Boston and opened a used clothing store in the black business district. He became immersed in the city’s activist black professional class–he joined the Prince Masons, became a member of the Massachusetts General Colored Association, and worked as an agent for Freedom’s Journal, the nation’s first black newspaper.6 All the while, he was reading voraciously, delving deep into the history of previous slaveholding societies such as ancient Rome and Egypt. According to one report, he spent at least four years studying global history and the Bible in order to craft his provocative argument.7

Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World was a unique blend of historical analysis, firsthand observation of racism in America, and religious fervor . Walker is animated throughout the text, but he comes most alive when challenging some of the nation’s sacred cows. Thomas Jefferson proves a useful foil. Walker returns multiple times to Notes on the State of Virginia, a 1785 book in which Jefferson declares that Black people are inferior to whites intellectually due to genetic deficiencies (“in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous,” reads one passage).8 Walker, practically rolling his eyes from the page, wonders how Jefferson could shrug off the circumstances that had stymied black progress for two centuries. “It is indeed surprising, that a man of such great learning..should speak so of a set of men in chains,” he wrote.9

Walker went further when he pointed out the hypocrisies laden in Jefferson’s crowning rhetorical achievement, the Declaration of Independence. “Compare your own language…from your Declaration of Independence, with your cruelties and murders inflicted by your cruel and unmerciful fathers and yourselves on our fathers and on us,” Walker wrote. “Men who have never given your fathers or you the least provocation!!!!!!”10

But as much as he seemed to delight in pillorying a Founding Father, Walker understood that Jefferson’s words carried the weight of dogma, so he called on his black peers to disprove them. “I am glad Mr. Jefferson has advanced his positions for your sake,” Walker wrote, “for you will either have to contradict or confirm him by your own actions.”11

Walker envisioned his Appeal as a spark for liberation in Black America, an echo of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense before the American Revolution. Leveraging his shipping contacts as a merchant in Boston, he had the book smuggled aboard steamships that docked in Savannah, New Orleans, and his hometown of Wilmington. He tapped into runaway slave networks that were able to carry the text further inland.12 Because most slaves couldn’t read, he called on literate black people to narrate the work aloud at community gatherings. The Appeal was more sermon than scholarly work, a call to action for every soul who laid eyes or ears on it. “Your full glory and happiness, as well as all other coloured people under Heaven, shall never be fully consummated, but with the entire emancipation of your enslaved brethren all over the world,” he wrote.13

The Appeal was seen as a ticking time bomb by white slave owners in the South, and they did everything in their power to defuse it. Following rumors that slaves in the town of New Bern had armed themselves after reading the Appeal, North Carolina’s legislature passed new laws banning the book and criminalizing slave literacy. In Charleston, a white mariner was arrested for circulating the text among black longshoremen. In Louisiana, a vicious new law decreed that anyone who wrote or distributed materials that could cause “insubordination among the slaves” could face life imprisonment or death.14 The scope and severity of the enforcement against the Appeal hints at how effectively it managed to circulate in the South.

Despite its impact when it was published, the Appeal’s historical resonance waned over time. Laws aimed at limiting the work’s spread eventually smothered its virality. Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831 became a greater flashpoint of black resistance and white backlash in the era. And Walker himself died in 1830 of tuberculosis, never getting a chance to build on his arguments. He was just 33 years old.15

Still, the Appeal has lived a long life circulating outside of classroom curricula and general history textbooks. Frederick Douglass cited it as a central influence, and W.E.B. Du Bois once called it “that tremendous indictment of slavery.”16 The Appeal has that “your favorite band’s favorite band” notoriety attached to it.

Even in 2026, Walker’s words are furious and bracing, far outside the bounds of what black people are expected to say or think. Before pushing his brethren toward radical action, though, Walker understood that he had to push them toward radical thought. Instead of asking for equality, he demanded it. "Should tyrants take it into their heads to emancipate any of you, remember that your freedom is your natural right,” he wrote. “You are men, as well as they, and instead of returning thanks to them for your freedom, return it to the Holy Ghost, who is our rightful owner."17

Subscribe now

“If a race has no history,” Carter G. Woodson once said, “it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.”

To Woodson, telling the black story was a matter of life and death. One hundred years ago, in February 1926, he founded Negro History Week to ensure the trials and achievements of black people would not be forgotten.

Woodson came of age in a time when few Americans knew much about the collective history of Black people. Black history was rarely taught in schools, and the first-hand accounts of Black life from those who had truly lived the history, such as the formerly enslaved, were not valued in academic circles. Woodson, a one-time coal miner from rural Virginia, experienced this erasure firsthand. While he was studying to earn his PhD at Harvard University, a famed professor told him “the Negro had no history.” Determined to prove him wrong, Woodson dedicated his life to chronicling black life and creating an infrastructure to ensure that black history would never again be ignored.

In 1915, while working as a high school history teacher, Woodson co-founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH). Based in Washington D.C., the organization’s mission focused on “the collection of sociological and historical documents and the promotion of studies bearing on the Negro.” ASNLH launched an academic periodical, the Journal of Negro History, and a Black-focused publishing imprint called Associated Publishers. As the editor of both enterprises, Woodson published hundreds of works of scholarship about Black life, ranging from analyses of black labor trends to firsthand slave narratives to explorations of the African diaspora. Many of the most preeminent black writers and thinkers of the 20th century came into Woodson’s orbit; Langston Hughes did clerical work for ASLNH as a young poet, while Zora Neale Hurston’s groundbreaking research on Cudjoe, one of the last living formerly enslaved African Americans, was funded in part by Woodson’s organization.

Woodson fought ferociously to keep ASNLH independent, often clashing with his primarily white donors at the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation. Ultimately deemed a “radical” by the white establishment, he and his organization were largely cut off from philanthropic funding in the 1930’s. Instead, Woodson turned to working and middle class black people for support. Black schoolteachers, businessmen and ministers rubbed shoulders with academic scholars at the annual ASNLH conference. Monetary contributions flowed in from 28 states. Though many donations were less than a dollar, they illustrated how widespread the thirst for black history was becoming.

Among ASNLH’s most active members was Chicago’s Vivian Harsh, who became the first black woman in the country to lead a branch of a public library. Harsh built an impressive collection of books at the library and spearheaded a lecture series that brought in the leading black intellectuals of the day. Adult education was also emphasized; Harsh co-founded a history club at the library that welcomed black Chicagoans of all ages to learn about their people’s past. “If we Negroes knew the full truth about what we, as a race, have endured,” Harsh remarked, “our respect and hunger for education would triple overnight.” She was one of many who shared black history at the local level without being perched in an ivory tower.

By the time Carter G Woodson died in 1950, he was being hailed as the “Father of Black History.” His most wide-reaching achievement in his varied career, however, was without question the establishment of Negro History Week. Initially devised by Woodson to help generate funding and publicity for ASNLH, Negro History Week quickly became popular in black communities, prompting lectures, parades, and special school curricula. As early as 1932, some white schools were also acknowledging the occassion. By the 1970s, Negro History Week had grown into Black History Month, with President Gearld Ford granting the celebration federal recognition in 1976.

Woodson did not live to see Black history become a ubiquitous part of American education, nor to see it systematically removed from school curricula over the course of the current decade. But there are lessons in his approach. He was prolific in his proudction of scholarly work, laying a rich soil of scholarhsip for future generations to sift through. He didn’t brook compromise with those who would neuter his message. Most importantly, he saw history as an oppportunity for everday people to make sense of their own place in the world. Woodson worked not only to preserve a Black past, but to ensure a Black future.

This piece was originally published at the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

Subscribe now

I have been writing a lot about resistance lately–resistance as organizing, resistance as truthtelling, resistance as violence. In the digital era resistance was memed into something docile and performative, an aestheticized activism conveyed through hashtags and social justice infographics. But for most of American history resistance has carried with it the potential of retaliation from the state. When the state is operating at its full capacity for violence and surveillance, to resist is to risk everything.

Yet America has always had resisters. We valorize a few of them after the fact and give them an angelic aura–the better to make their achievements seem divine and otherworldly. But resistance is a more collective labor, built on networks of communal trust and shared risk. At its most effective, resistance is not about a singular gallant moment, but about building the infrastructure to support the world you want to see, piece by piece.

—

This month for Smithsonian Magazine I wrote about a resister named Sam Green. He was a farmer, a preacher, a husband, a father. He was arrested and imprisoned for the crime of owning Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the famous antislavery novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Originally, the piece was going to be more about Uncle Tom’s Cabin itself and the various ways in which pro-slavery Southerners tried to censor the book. But my editor perceptively steered me toward a story more focused on Green and the resistance networks he circulated through in Maryland. Green was a co-founder of a black Methodist Church, an attendee at the Convention of Free Colored People, and—most gallingly to his white, slaveowning neighbors—a conductor on the Underground Railroad. He worked closely with Harriet Tubman and was involved in some of the most dramatic escapes of the era (read about the Dover Eight, who Green likely aided, if you haven’t). Green opened up his home to Tubman and the many runaway slaves she led to freedom, while using his position as an upstanding citizen in East New Market, Maryland to gather intelligence in both the black and white worlds.

Green’s arrest, I quickly discovered, was not about owning a book—it was about making every other free black person in Maryland think twice before opposing slavery. As a nation’s actions become more difficult for the average person to morally reconcile, its government has to work harder to compel compliance. Laws are passed that limit free thought. Political propaganda becomes increasingly untethered from reality. Punishments double as public warnings. The Sam Green case neatly reinforced all three of those goals.

What fascinated me most about Green’s story, though, was how ordinary his life seemed day to day, and how little of it was documented. He was one of about 75,000 free black Marylanders at the time he was arrested. He left behind no diaries or grand soliloquies, and the few quotes I could find of his were quite modest. History doesn’t remember Green as a lionized hero; there isn’t an epic account of his record of his resistance. His legacy can only be pieced together through other people’s stories—their interpretations of his actions and brief mentions of his home as a refuge in narratives of grand slave escapes. Tubman herself mentioned Green in passing when describing her favored Underground Railroad routes in interviews decades after the Civil War. It was a small but significant piece of evidence that his home provided a piece of infrastructure for the freedom movement.

Sam Green’s story stands out because he was imprisoned for owning a book. But he was not the only one to open his home to people on a quest for liberty. The National Park Service lists more than 800 sites on the Underground Railroad across 41 states on its Network to Freedom. There were a lot of Sam Greens out there.

The work of Underground Railroad conductors was secretive by nature; Green himself no doubt would have preferred to remain anonymous than be made infamous for his unusual “crime.” But he, like others whose names we don’t know, insisted on a better America, even as he went to church, tilled his land, and read a book from time to time. Resisters are not superheroes; they’re our neighbors, co-workers, and relatives. They’re everyday people lending a hand to justice in their everyday lives. Once we understand that, we can find the strength to resist within ourselves.

Check out the full feature on Sam Green online or in the January/February print edition of Smithsonian Magazine.

Kriska Desir contributed to this report.

Subscribe now

This is the second part of a two-part series. Read Part I here.

The morning fog still clung to the trees as Edward Gorsuch bled out in William Parker’s front yard. The slaveowner was dead. The slavecatching posse that had failed to retrieve Gorsuch’s runaways was gone, after beatings and bullets forced their hasty retreat. This was not a dark coda to a doomed encounter, though; it was the beginning of a new chapter in the government’s quest to put enslaved people and their white allies under heel. The shootout at Parker’s home, which would long be referred to as the Christiana Riot, was not just about one slaveowner’s death. It symbolized an attack on the state, and it demanded a vicious riposte.

William Parker hadn’t fired the gun that killed Gorsuch, but his life in Christiana was over. He quickly fled the area, as did Gorsuch’s former slaves and the other people who had been holed up in Parker’s house. Knowing that he’d be pursued doggedly by police, Parker even separated from his wife and children so he could slip away faster. Over the next two days he and two allies traveled 500 miles to Rochester, New York, where another one-time fugitive slave, Frederick Douglass, awaited their arrival.1 Impressed by Parker’s “cool determination,” Douglass fed and sheltered the group, then placed them on a steamship to Toronto. “To me, they were heroic defenders of the just rights of man against manstealers and murderers,” Douglass later wrote.2

After the primary suspects in Gorsuch’s killing escaped Christiana, police began seeking out others to punish instead. The day after the shootout, local officials deputized and armed about 40 white railroad workers to detain suspects–one of the men vowed to shoot “the first black thing” he saw. They were soon joined by about 45 marines and a contingent of Philadelphia policemen, signifying the immediate state and federal interest in the killing. Dozens of black people were arrested; one teenage boy was hog-tied and carried off by police.

But as much as the Christiana Riot had uncorked an always-simmering hatred of black people among some locals, the government’s ire quickly turned to the white people who had been involved. Castner Hanway, a white miller and William Parker’s neighbor, had been one of the first to arrive on the scene to help the Parkers after they rang their alarm horn. When the deputy marshal had asked for assistance apprehending the fugitive slaves, Hanway refused and warned the slavecatchers that they should leave the scene. It was perhaps too outlandish–or too dangerous–for white officials to believe that a group of black Americans could arm and violently defend themselves without a white leader. So instead of Parker, the 30-year-old Hanway was quickly cast as the mastermind behind the violence.3

During a quickly assembled federal hearing, a grand jury indicted 38 men, mostly black, on charges of treason for their alleged involvement in the riot.4 It was an extreme charge that carried a political weight beyond murder. But President Millard Fillmore and his White House had been signalling that they would not condone any challenges to the Fugitive Slave Act. “If men get together and declare a law of Congress shall not be executed in any case, and assemble in numbers and force to prevent the execution of such law...It is treason, treason, TREASON,” Secretary of State Daniel Webster said in a May 1851 address.5

With the indictments in tow, federal prosecutors hatched a plan to try Castner Hanway first in order to make him a public example of what happens to people (even white people) who aid fugitive slaves. The case, which was to be tried in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, became a national sensation. Southerners (and some Northern Democrats) viewed a guilty verdict as the rightful outcome to stop abolitionist rhetoric and activity from spiraling further out of control. Antislavery advocates, meanwhile, saw the charges as a clear case of government overreach. Each day onlookers lined up hours in advance for the Hanway trial. The crowd was filled with women as well as black people; courtroom bailiffs initially tried to segregate the audience by gender but eventually gave up. Hanway himself, tall and finely dressed, cut a mysterious figure; he never testified during the trial and left no writing or interviews with his thoughts on the ordeal.

Prosecutors presented various members of the Gorsuch posse who all testified that Hanway had “inspired” the black people during the standoff by his mere white presence. They tried to cast the Parker clan’s effective defense of the fugitive slaves as a coordinated scheme to overthrow the U.S. government. They drew a tenuous link between Hanway and this elaborate conspiracy. But no one on the witness stand even knew what words Hanway might have exchanged with Parker and the others during the standoff. Later in the trial, a key black witness who prosecutors hoped would corroborate their account flipped at the last minute and said he wasn’t even present during the shooting.6

Robert C. Grier, one of two judges presiding over the case, noted that the actions of the Christiana rioters, violent as they may have been, were understandable in an environment where black kidnappings were a regular occurrence. He cautioned the jury that if they found Hanway guilty, it would set a “dangerous precedent” by making more Americans susceptible to charges of treason.7

The jury took only fifteen minutes to deliberate. Hanway was found not guilty. Federal prosecutors soon dropped the charges on all the other accused rioters, sensing they had little chance of a different outcome. State and local officials in Pennsylvania declined to file any charges of their own. Despite the shocking killing of a white man, no one would ever face a criminal conviction for the events of the Christiana Riot.

In the North, antislavery advocates celebrated the verdict as a victory for civil rights and a righteous rebuke of the immorality of the Fugitive Slave Act. In the South, however, the decision was seen as a betrayal all its own. Maryland, Gorsuch’s home state, was particularly irate. Talk of secession from the Union grew louder. “Henceforth, words will give place to acts,” warned Maryland Governor Enoch Louis Lowe, who would later back the Confederacy in the Civil War. Rather than bringing the nation closer together through compromise, the Fugitive Slave Act only divided the country further as it highlighted the stark differences in how Americans felt about slavery.

Hanway and the other white men who had been indicted were celebrated as heroes by white progressives. They were feted by the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society and mythologized as heroes in local remembrances of the riot in Christiana. The black people who had actually thwarted the slavecatchers became footnotes in a historic moment of their own creation. But they had escaped the tendrils of bondage and continued the search for true freedom.8

William Parker had a difficult time when he got off the steamship Toronto; money and work were tough to come by, and he feared might be extradited back to the United States. Eventually, though, he was reunited with his wife and children, and the family relocated to a small town called Buxton in Ontario. A minister loaned him some money for a down payment on a 50-acre lot. The Parkers built a new home there–not a fortress like the one in Christiana, but a refuge. “The white settlers in the vicinity were much opposed to colored people,” Parker reflected later. “But the spread of intelligence and religion in the community has wrought a great change in them. Prejudice is fast being uprooted; indeed, they do not appear like the same people that they were. In a short time I hope the foul spirit will depart entirely.”9

Subscribe now

William Parker’s house was the closest thing the black people of Christiana, Pennsylvania had to a fortress. The two-story stone structure was nestled in a thicket of trees and commanded a half mile berth from the nearest neighbor–“almost invisible to the outside world,” one observer noted. A horn in the attic served as a call-to-arms. If a neighbor heard the horn, they knew to grab the closest gun or corn-cutter and head to the Parker house to defend against whatever enemy had punctured the community’s tenuous peace. On Sept. 11, 1851, that enemy was a posse of Maryland slavecatchers.1

Edward Gorsuch, a farmer from Baltimore County, Maryland, had been after four of his former slaves for the better part of two years, since they walked off his property with five bushels of stolen wheat and their freedom in the fall of 1849. He had enlisted the aid of his son, a few hometown friends, and most critically, a United States Deputy Marshal named Henry Kline. Even for the era, Gorsuch’s pursuit was unusually dogged. But he was empowered by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which vastly expanded the capacity of enslavers to reach into the supposedly free states of the North and snatch human beings back into the jaws of servitude.2

Gorsuch had tracked his former slaves 60 miles, right to Parker’s stone house. His intel was sound–two of them, Nelson Ford and Joshua Hammond, were both inside the home with Parker and his family. But an agent of the Underground Railroad had tipped Parker off earlier in the week that Gorsuch’s posse was snooping around Christiana. The runaway slaves had come to Parker’s fortress seeking protection. While Gorsuch had planned a surprise ambush, it seemed more likely that he was stumbling into a trap.3

Still, he thought, he had the law on his side, both in theory and in flesh. As the slavecatchers prowled around the outside of the stone house, Kline, the U.S. deputy marshal, read out the warrants a federally appointed commissioner had issued for the seizure of the four black men. “We are commanded to take you, dead or alive,” Kline said, “so you may as well give up at once.”4

Parker was unfazed; he had faced off against slavecatchers before. He dared the men to enter his home and come up the narrow staircase to try to take the two men by force. Or perhaps, he mused, they’d like to survey the livestock in his barn. They were more likely to find stolen property there than amongst a room full of black folks.

Kline and Gorsuch tired of Parker’s taunts. Kline instructed one of the men in the posse to start gathering hay to scatter across the base of the stone house. They’d burn the Negroes out if they had to.

Parker’s wife Eliza dashed up to the attic to reach the horn. Perching in the window sill, she blew a note that perked the ears of free black people for miles around and cooled the blood of the slavecatchers at the front gates. Two of the white men scrambled up into an orchard by the house and fired at Eliza’s window, but their aim was wide. She blew the alarm again, and again.5

The slavecatchers grew nervous. Gorsuch’s son Dickinson wanted to retreat. Even the deputy marshal figured they could come back later with a greater show of police force–they were within their legal right, after all–and get the Negroes to stand down.6

But Gorsuch refused to budge. While he had considered himself a benevolent enslaver when his colored people were meek and kind, he could spare them no sympathy after the niggers ran away. He wouldn’t leave until the proper balance had been restored–not only on his financial ledger but in the social order he was bent on upholding. “I want my property,” he declared, “and I will have it.”7

—

Sometimes in America, a law is so heinous that its passage becomes a radicalizing event. Injustices that had felt like abstractions of evil become concrete as the machinery of enforcement whirs into action. Victims transform from demographic groups to names to neighbors. Indifference mutates from a numbing sedative to a needle lodged in the back of your mind–the pain of a moral prick without the release of an opiate. This was the fallout of the Fugitive Slave Act, which helped propel the nation on the path toward civil war.

The act was the most controversial piece of the Compromise of 1850, a bundle of Congressional laws that sought to placate the South by cementing slavery’s place in the Union. Under the Fugitive Slave Act, a slaveowner could venture to a free state and claim an alleged runaway slave as his property with no documentation beyond his own testimony. The slaveowner had the right to enlist U.S. marshals, their deputies, and local citizens in his slavecatching posse; anyone who refused to help could be accused of helping the fugitive and face a fine of up to $1,000 or jail time. Once the black person was apprehended, they were subject to a hearing where they could not testify on their own behalf. A federal commissioner would decide their fate, though this official would receive a payment twice as high if they ruled in favor of the slaveowner rather than the alleged slave. More than 80 percent of fugitive slave hearings ultimately ended with black people being shipped south into bondage.8

While many Northerners initially expressed support or indifference toward the law, sentiment turned against it as it was put into practice. One black man accused of being a fugitive in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania was killed by a pair of U.S. deputy marshals who were trying to apprehend him. A pair of black parents were shipped back to the South by the courts, leaving their youngest child, born free in Pennsylvania, an orphan.9 Horror stories filled newspaper pages, but more importantly, touched individual communities. The entire fugitive slave-catching system, Frederick Douglass once remarked, allowed slavery to be “nationalized in its most horrible and revolting form.”10

A violent strain of resistance quickly formed against the law, and William Parker became one of its most effective adherents. Born a slave in Maryland around 1821, he ran away to freedom at the age of 16 after getting into a scuffle with his enslaver, who was trying to beat him with a stick (“My rights as a freeman were secured by my own right arm,” he later wrote). Parker continued to match force with force; he moved to Lancaster County in Pennsylvania and led a mutual-protection society for black people. Their mission was combating slave catchers and their allies by any means. Sometimes that meant violent standoffs with the Gap Gang, a group of white ruffians who functioned as slave bounty hunters in the region. Other times it meant beating or threatening fellow black residents they discovered had been aiding the slavecatchers.11

The notion that the issue of slavery might be solved through politics or compromise did not figure in Parker’s calculus; even for a free black man in a supposedly free state, life was about survival. “The laws for personal protection are not made for us, and we are not bound to obey them,” he once explained to a white neighbor. “If a fight occurs I want the whites to keep away. They have a country and may obey the laws. But we have no country.”12

Parker was widely beloved, respected, and feared in Christiana by the fall of 1851, but Edward Gorsuch knew nothing of the man whose home he had come to raid. Gorsuch, about 53 years old and reared in a slave society, imagined black people to be docile and eager to submit to authority. His runaway slaves were less people to him than confused pets. He seemed convinced they would prefer life on his farm than whatever hold on independence they’d carved out for themselves here in the Pennsylvania wilderness.13

The sound of the horn should have been the last signal he needed that this wasn’t the case.

Within half an hour of Parker’s wife sounding the alarm, roughly 100 black men and women emerged from the thicket of the woods. They carried pistols, hunting rifles, scythes, rocks–whatever tool might come in handy. A couple of white neighbors also appeared; they weren’t part of the black mutual-protection group, but they also refused to follow the letter of the Fugitive Slave Law when Gorsuch and Kline asked them for help apprehending the runaways. “You need not come here to make arrests,” Castner Hanway, one of the white men, said to the deputy marshal. “You cannot do it.”14

But finally Gorsuch saw him–Joshua Hammond, one of the slaves he was looking for. Gorsuch had described him as “well grown” in the legal documents he filed seeking Joshua’s apprehension. He simply couldn’t understand why the slave had run away. He even planned to free Joshua–one day.15

But Joshua had changed his name to Samuel Thompson after his escape. The young slave from Gorsuch’s farm and the free man now standing in William Parker’s front yard were different people. Thompson looked at his former enslaver. “Old man, you had better go home to Maryland,” he said.

“You had better give up,” Gorsuch replied, “and come home with me.”16

Go home. Come home.

Thompson grabbed a pistol that a friend nearby was holding and clubbed Gorsuch in the head. Gorsuch fell to his knees. He tried to rise, but Thompson clubbed him again. Then he fired a bullet into Gorsuch at point-blank range.17

More gunshots followed, echoing through the forest in the morning gloom. The accusations of treason and calls for hangings would soon echo louder. But there was a quiet tragedy in that moment before the bang, when the man seeking freedom asked his former captor to abandon this doomed mission, and the captor still could not fathom that the man he saw as a dog might actually bite him.

Part II of this series will be published the week of Oct. 6.

Subscribe now

William Still was a meticulous man, as careful with facts and figures as he was with the people placed under his protection. When fugitive slaves made it to Philadelphia on their way to freedom, Still’s office at the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society was often their first stop (if he did not meet them at the train station when they arrived). He and his wife Letitia opened their home to freedom-seekers even as slavecatchers prowled the city’s streets. If a runaway slave needed a train ticket for the next leg of their trip, or a haircut to better blend in with black Northerners, Still and his cadre of abolitionist allies would pay for it. Everything was documented, down to the date and penny, in Still’s copious notes, along with newspaper clippings, interviews he conducted with the fugitive slaves, and letters from those who had continued on past Philadelphia to find opportunity elsewhere. He brought form and order to a decentralized network that had no president, no balance sheet, and no official headquarters.1

“Nobody professed to own the Underground Railroad," Still reflected later.2 True. But Still was the closest thing the Underground Railroad had to an accountant, and later, a historian. His work–and especially the book he would eventually publish–allowed fugitive slaves to have the final word on what they experienced, rather than letting slaveowners and their political allies craft a false national memory of enslavement.

Born free in 1821 to parents who had escaped slavery, Still moved to Philadelphia as a young man in the early 1840’s. He worked odd jobs as a brickyard laborer and a domestic servant but longed for a role that would expand his intellect. In 1847, he landed a position at the offices of the Pennsylvania Anti Slavery Society, an abolitionist group that sought equality for black Americans. Still was hired as a clerk. His mostly mundane duties included cleaning the office and reading the mail. But he was smart, savvy, and almost religiously focused on work. Soon enough he’d play a central role in the organization.3

The Anti Slavery Society office, located a couple of blocks from Independence Hall, became the “unofficial headquarters for Philadelphia’s Underground Railroad,” according to historian Andrew K. Diemer in his book Vigilance. The organization had a network of agents in nearby cities like Wilmington, Delaware and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania who ushered runaways to Philadelphia by train. Still and his boss James McKim would then help them continue on their journey northward, often to Canada. Still was present in the office on the day in 1849 when a large freight package arrived containing a human being–Henry “Box” Brown, who famously escaped his enslaver by shipping himself north via steamboat, train, and wagon. Still appears in a famous lithograph that depicts the moment abolitionists removed the lid from Brown’s crate.4

By the early 1850’s, Still was regularly assisting McKim with his key duties, such as editing the abolitionist newspaper The Pennsylvania Freeman and coordinating arrivals of runaway slaves. But he also realized that the Anti-Slavery Society did not have the means to help all the people that were coming through its doors. Many leading white abolitionists of the era saw the Underground Railroad as secondary to the larger mission of toppling the institution of slavery through political and economic means.5 But Still saw these brave individuals who traveled the Railroad’s dangerous routes as symbols of hope, representing the best of his people. ”They were determined to have liberty even at the cost of life,” he wrote.6 Still understood that these individual acts of defiance could collectively spell slavery’s doom.

In 1852, Still and several other abolitionists revived an independent group called the Vigilance Committee, which first started aiding runaway slaves in the 1830’s. Robert Purvis, the son-in-law of Philadelphia entrepreneur James Forten, led the organization. Still was named secretary, tasked with keeping the committee’s finances in order and documenting its activities. It was through this organization that Still began taking detailed notes of his every interaction with the fugitive slaves that he aided.7

Still had another motivation for chronicling the lives of runaway slaves. One day in 1850, while he was working at the Anti-Slavery Office, an anxious man named Peter walked through the front door. He had fled a plantation in Alabama and was seeking his parents, who he had been separated from as an enslaved child. Still was shocked; he realized Peter was his long-lost brother, who their mother had been mourning for decades. Still coordinated a heartfelt reunion between Peter and their mother in New Jersey. The experience inspired him to document all he could about the fugitives he encountered, in hopes that they too might one day be reconnected with lost relatives.8

—

After the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, Still remained committed to fighting for black equality. He railed against Philadelphia’s segregated street cars and helped compel the Pennsylvania state legislature to pass a law desegregating them in 1867. He also became a successful businessman, operating a thriving coal plant and launching himself into Philadelphia’s black elite.9

But the work of his abolitionist days wasn’t over. Not long after the desegregation fight, he wrote to his daughter that he wanted to publish a comprehensive history of the Underground Railroad. The book would be modeled after The History of England, the nonfiction epic by British writer Lord Macalauy that used novelistic techniques to enrapture readers. Still would provide a similarly sweeping tale of black resistance in antebellum America, relying mostly on his careful records from the Vigilance Committee.10 The work felt urgent; white Southerners were already rewriting the story of the Civil War. Virginia author Edward A. Pollard coined the term “The Lost Cause" in his popular 1866 book defending the “nobility” of Southern slave society.11

Still “crashed” the book, to borrow a term from modern publishing. He wrote from five in the morning to eleven at night, producing about four pages each day. William Henry Furness, a prominent white clergyman, offered editing help.12 The book was anchored by vignettes of people who had made novel and daring escapes that attracted national attention, like Henry Box Brown or Ellen Craft, the black woman who posed as a white man to ferry herself and her enslaved husband to freedom. But the most affecting portions of the book to me were the small stories of largely anonymous black people who insisted upon liberty. A man from Delaware who escaped after his enslaver had threatened to wade “up to his knees in his blood.” A woman from Maryland who said if white folks caught a slave reading where she was from, they would “almost cut your throat.” A man from Alabama who hitched perilous rides atop northern-bound train cars during the night.13 All of them made it out, their stories rendered immortal through Still’s chronicle.

The Underground Railroad was published in 1872 in Philadelphia. At more than 700 pages, the tome was pitched as “an authentic history of a remarkable organization” in advertisements.14 Like any determined author, Still did a lot of self-promotion. He hired a team of sales agents, both black and white, to distribute the book. Through their network he reached readers in Georgia, California, and every corner of America in between. By the end of the decade, the book had sold between 5,000 and 10,000 copies.15 It was no Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the bestseller list, but it was enough to ensure that Still’s work would not be forgotten.

William Still understood that the slavery’s memory would be framed by the recorders of history. The abolitionists like him, who owned newspapers and thriving businesses, would inevitably get their due–especially his white peers. But it was the slaves themselves who risked becoming invisible in their own story, viewed as a backdrop for war or political theater rather than individuals who’d suffered the gravest atrocities and persevered. Still’s mission, he wrote, was “not for the purpose of amusing the reader, but to show what efforts were made and what success was gained for Freedom under difficulties.”16

More than anything, Still wanted to give the enslaved a voice. Their testimonials are his legacy.

Kriska Desir contributed to this report.

It’s a strange time to be a writer. Sometimes I try to get on Bluesky or Substack Notes to recapture that illusion of a public commons (or freewheeling dive bar) that Twitter provided, but everyone is too committed to their bit now to feel like an actual person. I boot up ChatGPT and query “Write an article that sounds like Victor Luckerson” to get a check-in on the timeline for my obsolescence. I click on an article about how to salvage my shrinking attention span but get distracted halfway through. Going online feels tedious and compulsively habitual at the same time.

Hanging over it all is the looming sensation, beamed from news headlines, executive orders, and America First pre-roll ads on YouTube, that each day is a bit less free than the last.

It’s a strange time.

But I remind myself that I wrote before the rise of social media or AI or nightmare news in the palm of your hand. I wrote to try to figure things out about the world and myself, and for that pleasurable mental pop of a sentence sliding into place, a thought crystallizing from the ether of your mind into flesh and carbon on the page, where it can live forever, even if it’s not read by another single soul.

It’s hard to explain, but it’s the best feeling.

I’ve had a couple of false starts with relaunching Run It Back as a regular endeavor in the last couple of years, but I have some momentum behind me now (yes I’m counting two articles as “momentum”). And it feels more important than ever to have a space that is independent, where I can keep my mind limber amid a hall of political mirrors. This is a grounding space for me. Hopefully it can be for you too.

Every two weeks I’ll have another short narrative for you about a slice of black history–a person, a moment, an idea that’s slipped (or was jettisoned) out of the public consciousness. I don’t have an editorial schedule mapped out, exactly. I’ve enjoyed following one interesting tangent to another, which is how the best parts of Built From the Fire came together. Right now I’m writing about Philadelphia before the Civil War and how black people navigated freedom there for themselves and others. I want to write about Washington D.C. (where I now live) sometime soon and living under siege. But I also want to write about adventurers, inventors, unusual thinkers. If you know my work, you know there will be a balance between the dark and the light.

I’m also now a national correspondent for Smithsonian magazine. I’m writing a few in-depth pieces for them each year. The first was about the black daredevil pilot Bessie Coleman. The next, yet to be published, is about a man who was arrested for reading a book. All the stories will be in print as well as on the Smithsonian website.

I have a couple of public events coming up. Tonight (Wednesday, Aug. 27), I’m giving a public lecture about Greenwood in New York’s Bryant Park, sponsored by the New York Historical Society and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. On Sept. 11, I’ll be back in New York at the Brooklyn Public Library for a panel discussion with authors Gilbert King and Robert Samuels about the erasure of black history. Both events are free to the public.

I had been planning for many more public events this year—I’ve really enjoyed traveling to colleges and talking to students about my work and their own aspirations as writers. But federal budget cuts to higher ed and a broader pullback in funding for anything that smells like “diversity” has mostly killed that off.

I’m working on another book. It’s early stages but I hope to have something to share with you about it early next year.

It’s a strange time to be a writer, especially an independent one. A year ago I thought I had a good idea about how these puzzle pieces fit into a career–now I’m not so sure. But I’ll keep the lights on here until the power bill comes due. It’s a way to stay whole in a world splintering apart.

Thanks for your support.

“As a Southerner I feel it is my duty to stand up here tonight and bear testimony against slavery…I was brought up under its wing: I witnessed for many years its demoralizing influences, and its destructiveness to human happiness. It is admitted by some that the slave is not happy under the worst forms of slavery. But I have never seen a happy slave.”1

Angelina Grimké didn’t waver as she spoke. Before her was a sea of three thousand expectant faces–black and white, man and woman, all seated side by side in Philadelphia's new Pennsylvania Hall. The three-story structure, which featured polished walnut benches and state-of-the-art gas lighting, was one of the largest event venues in the city. Above the platform where Grimké stood, the state motto unspooled across a grand arch in regal gold letters: “Virtue, Liberty and Independence."2

Her speech should have been a triumphant one. She and the other local abolitionists, black and white, had helped spearhead the creation of this grand monument to their moral crusade. For three days in 1838, they had hosted a litany of passionate abolitionist speakers, hopeful that the righteousness of their argument would shift the mindsets of the white Philadelphians who were rushing to slavery’s defense long after it was outlawed in the city. But as Grimké spoke, her words were punctuated by the sound of rocks battering the windows of the building. Angry, vulgar jeers outside carried the edge of expected violence. The hearts of white Philadelphians were not thawing–they were hardening. And now, a mob was forming.

—-

Pennsylvania Hall was supposed to supercharge political momentum abolitionists had built over the course of the 1830s. In 1833, William Lloyd Garrison and James Forten helped form the American Anti-Slavery Society, which advocated for the immediate emancipation of all U.S. slaves.3 The stance was deemed radical by much of white America, but the abolitionist movement was gaining new adherents every year. By 1838, more than 100,000 people were members of the organization, which boasted more than a thousand local chapters across the country.4

Women played an especially vital role in the growing movement. Because the American Anti-Slavery Society only included men, a group of Philadelphia women formed a companion group in the wake of its founding. The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society pushed to end slavery immediately as well as eliminate “prejudice against free blacks.” The group was biracial from the beginning and used multiple tactics to pursue abolition. Members held regular petition drives to pressure Congress to abolish slavery in federally controlled districts and helped lead the “free produce” movement, an effort to convince Americans to stop buying goods created with slave labor. They also aided the city’s growing free black population by building a school for black children.5

When Angelina Grimké and her sister Sarah joined the Society in 1835, they became star lecturers because of their unusual backstory. They were well-to-do white women from a slaveholding family in South Carolina but became abolitionists after witnessing the brutality of the practice up close. The Grimkés often spoke in front of mixed-gender audiences, itself a taboo of the time.6

As abolitionism’s salience grew, however, it was met with a growing backlash, even in so-called “free states” of the North. Many white Philadelphians resented the free black people who were flocking to the city because of its reputation as a haven of liberty. A newly drafted state constitution stripped black men of their voting rights in 1838. Rhetoric around liberty and equality in the place that birthed American independence was replaced with talk of the superior white race.7

Abolitionists soon found that assembly halls and churches in the city refused to host their meetings, often for fear of mob attacks (Phildaphelia was wracked by multiple race riots in the 1830’s). So they decided to build their own meeting house, where they could organize, convert more people to their cause, and celebrate the persuasive power of free speech. Forty thousand dollars were raised during a quick stock-offering campaign, with many of the initial funders being women. "Here shall Free Discussion find a refuge and a home!" one abolitionist said at a fundraising event.8

When Pennsylvania Hall opened on May 14, 1838, it was one of the city’s grandest structures. The first floor boasted an abolitionist bookstore, offices for the abolitionist newspaper the Pennsylvania Freeman, and several meeting spaces available for rent to the public. The large auditorium on the second floor, known as the “Grand Saloon,” was envisioned as a place where lively debates on the issues of the day would unfold. Abolitionists from across the North attended the opening ceremonies–white leaders like William Lloyd Garrison and Lucretia Mott, as well as black ones like James Forten and Sarah Mapps Douglass. This was the space where the nation could chart a course to an egalitarian future.

But white Philadelphians seethed when they observed men and women attending meetings in the same space–and worse, seeing black and white people walking arm in arm together into the building. A rumor spread that the abolitionists were championing “amalgamation”--intermarriage between the races. The evening after the Hall opened, anonymous placards were placed around the city, defending slaveholders’ rights and urging white people to head to the hall to “interfere, forcibly if they must” in the opening activities.9

The next morning a rowdy crowd formed outside the hall and grew more belligerent as the day wore on. Philadelphia’s ineffectual mayor and sheriff did little to quell their anger. The women abolitionists, for their part, refused to be cowed. They continued with their meetings and speeches as the mob grew. “What would the breaking of every window be? What would the leveling of this Hall be?” Angelina Grimké mused from the main stage. “What if the mob should now burst in upon us, break up our meeting and commit violence upon our persons — would this be anything compared with what the slaves endure?”10

On Thursday, May 17, the situation turned even darker. One white female delegate recalled witnessing “the worst language” and “the most hideous countenances” as she and other abolitionists walked arm in arm with their black colleagues to try to shield them from the mob.11 In the afternoon meetings at the hall were canceled and the doors were locked as a precautionary measure. But few police were present to take control of the angry crowd, and a call for civilians to step in and serve as deputies went unheeded.12

Around 8 p.m., roughly three hundred men broke into the building, using axes and crowbars provided by some of Philadelphia’s shipwrights. The frenzied mob smashed the Hall’s furniture and used the texts from the abolitionist bookstore as kindling for a great fire. The gas pipes were busted open and pointed at the growing flame. Outside, as firemen approached the scene, a larger group of onlookers blocked them from dousing the blaze. Local women waved handkerchiefs from their windows in celebration of the carnage, while roving members of the mob looked for black people or abolitionists to assault in the streets. The flames of Pennsylvania Hall burned so agonizingly bright that night, they turned blue.13

The entire structure was destroyed, save for an eerie skeleton of charred granite walls. Though there were no fatalities, black Philadelphians still bore the brunt of the mob’s violence, with some black abolitionists assaulted in the streets and a black orphanage being burned the following day. While a handful of men were arrested, city officials failed to dole out any serious punishments for the attack. A committee convened by the city council instead blamed abolitionists for angering the community with their “repulsive” and “inflammatory” ideas.14 The owners of the hall waged a yearslong legal battle to get the local government to reimburse them for their losses, but they ultimately received only a fraction of what they had put into the venue. Pennsylvania Hall was never rebuilt.15

The mob’s goal that day was to crush the spirit of the abolitionist movement. On that front, at least, they failed. The brutal attack cast supporters of slavery as violent and chaotic, while the abolitionists were holding up the tenets of free speech. “What opened the eyes of most whites,” observed historian Beverly C. Tomek, “was what such mob action meant for their own freedom.”16

The women of the Philadelphia Anti Slavery Society met the very next day in the classroom of one of their members. Angelina Grimké’s sister Sarah proposed a resolution vowing to sit with black Philadelphians at church, walk with them publicly in the streets, visit them in their homes and “[receive] them as we do our fellow white citizens.”17 The group quickly approved it, doubling down on their vision of a racially mixed society. Hate would not win this day, even when it burned white-hot.

Kriska Desir contributed research to this report.

At noon on July 8, 1776, a colonel in the Continental Army strode to the steps of Independence Hall clutching a freshly printed broadside and began reading the Declaration of Independence to the public for the first time. Crowded around him were some of Philadelphia’s wealthiest merchants and lawyers.1 No one paid much mind to the nine-year-old black boy who had also found his way to the State House Yard that afternoon. But for young James Forten, the moment was a turning point.2 He would carry the words he heard that day for the rest of his life, summoning a particularly resonant line in his own future writings: “All men are created equal.”

Sixty-two years later, Forten sat at a Presbyterian church in Philadelphia as another demand for liberty was presented--not a declaration, but a call to action. The Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens, drafted by Philadelphia’s black leaders in 1838, sought to prevent Pennsylvania from stripping black men of their voting rights. A public vote on a new state constitution was imminent, and the Appeal was meant to persuade white voters that disenfranchising black people was not only morally wrong but a danger to the political stability of the new nation. “When you have taken from an individual his right to vote,” one passage read, “you have made the government, in regard to him, a mere despotism; and you have taken a step toward making it a despotism to all.”3

Pennsylvania was hardly the only state backsliding on civil rights at the time. The types of people who were “equal” in the United States seemed to be growing narrower with each passing year. But Forten had sacrificed too much for his country to see the nation’s core ideals tossed aside so easily. He insisted on believing in America. He had to.

---

James Forten broke boundaries for what a black man could achieve in the new United States, and he began early. At age 14 he volunteered to fight for the colonies in the American Revolution, sailing the seas on a privateer in support of the Continental Navy. He soon survived a stint as a captive of British forces. When a British captain offered to free him if he sided with the crown, the young Forten replied, “I have been taken prisoner for the liberties of my country, and never will prove a traitor to her interest."4

After the war, Forten returned to Philadelphia and took up his father’s industry of sailmaking. With keen business sense and a rapport with people of all races, Forten soon built his sailmaking enterprise into a local empire. He owned property across Philadelphia and employed both black and white workers. He stood at the forefront of a growing and relatively prosperous population of free black people in the city, numbering about 15,000 by 1830.5 Many of his neighbors and friends were former slaves. Some had been freed as Northern states abolished slavery one by one in the early 1800’s, while others had escaped the plantations of the Deep South in search of freedom. Philadelphia represented liberty to much of Black America.6

Notions of freedom in the early United States were bound up with the right to vote. As the early states were drafting their first constitutions in the 1790’s and early 1800’s, many of them echoed the soaring rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence, extending suffrage to “all men” or “freemen.” Such language ostensibly included the growing free black population. As far south as North Carolina7 and Kentucky8, black men technically had voting rights, though in many communities intimidation and other voter suppression tactics kept them from the polls. Forten himself did not vote, but he exerted political power by dictating to his white employees who they should vote for and even accompanying them to the polls.9

As the 1800’s wore on and the idealism of the Revolution waned, however, black people saw their rights steadily crimped in both the South and the North. One by one, states amended their constitutions to take the franchise from black voters.10 New states admitted to the Union, such as Michigan, barred black voting from the onset.11 By the mid-1830’s, only seven of the 26 U.S. states allowed black men to vote. This retrenchment was part of a broader restriction of rights for anyone not deemed “American” enough; immigrants also saw their voting rights rolled back during this time.12

Forten was used to pushing back against such incursions on black autonomy--"Let us, in legislation, be considered as men,” he wrote in a famous 1813 treatise called “Letters From a Man of Colour.”13 But the backlash to black progress reached a boiling point during Pennsylvnia’s state constitutional convention in 1837 and 1838. Economic competition between black and white workers had led to a series of race riots in recent years, and politicians had begun hawking false stories about voter fraud to demonize the few black Pennsylvanians who dared to venture to the polls. While the state’s original constitution allowed all “freemen” who paid taxes to vote, a delegate proposed changing the language to “white freemen” to put an end to any notions of racial equality.14

Black Pennsylvanians did all they could to stop their disenfranchisement, but each effort was met with a rebuff. When James Forten’s son tried to sit in the gallery during the voting debate at the constitutional convention, he was "brutally" removed by an officer.15 Another black Pennsylvanian, Wiliam Fogg, filed a lawsuit when he was turned away from the polls in a county election. The state Supreme Court ruled against him, arguing that “no coloured race was party to our social compact.”16 With judges helping to clear a legal path, the convention delegates voted in favor of disenfranchising black men across the state.

The new constitution was set to become law unless white voters rejected it at the polls, so Philadelphia’s black leaders launched a campaign to change hearts and minds. The Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens was a last-ditch effort to rally the electorate to the cause of black suffrage. Robert Purvis, a prominent abolitionist and Forten’s son-in-law, was the main author of the document.

Robert Purvis (left) and Jamse Forten (right) were part of a family that fought for black freedom in Philadelphia

The Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens walked through a detailed legal argument for why free black people should be considered citizens, citing both the U.S. Constitution and the original Pennsylvania one. It invoked Benjamin Franklin, the most famous Pennsylvanian of all, who became a staunch abolitionist late in his life. Throughout the document, black Pennsylvaians regularly regularly returned to the core tenets of American democracy that had been laid out at the nation’s founding--no taxation without representation, due process of law, and that persistent notion of equality. “We love our native country, much as it has wronged us,” one passage read, “and in the peaceable exercise of our inalienable rights, we will cling to it.”17

Forten and other black leaders eagerly endorsed the Appeal during a March 1838 meeting at a Presbyterian Church. The work was shared around the country in abolitionist circles like The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison’s antislavery newspaper.18 But it wasn’t enough to sway white Pennsylvanians. In October 1838, the new state constitution was approved by a narrow margin of roughly 1,200 votes--less than the total number of black men in the state who had been denied the franchise.19

Pennsylvania was the last state to amend its constitution to disenfranchise black voters before the Civil War. James Forten tried to file another legal appeal in 1838, but it went nowhere.20 He died in 1842, in what must have felt like a nadir for American politics and morality.

But there are lessons in failure as much as victory. Forten and his neighbors refused to suffer through a darkening political climate in silence. Documents like the Appeal for Forty Thousand Citizens make clear that the nation’s free black population was politically active long before the Civil War. And Forten’s commitment to black progress served as inspiration for his children and son-in-law Purvis, who would play key roles in Philadelphia’s antislavery moment and the development of the Underground Railroad there.21 Forten did not live to see America live up to its promise, but his story is a reminder that citizens have the power and responsibility to challenge injustice, even when it seems like no one is listening.

One day last fall, when I was home in Montgomery, I reconnected with a childhood friend who I had not seen in years. Cicely was so excited about my work and had been cheering me on from afar (it’s always a bit surreal when someone you know personally pops up in the YouTube comments for one of your book talks). She is a teacher, mother, and founder of a local children’s museum, so elevating our history is especially important to her. She told me that the next neglected story I needed to dive into was the legacy of Monroe Street.

“What’s Monroe Street?” I asked. 

Cicely’s eyes got wide. Monroe Street, she told me, was the street behind Dexter Avenue, where black businesses in Montgomery had thrived and the Civil Rights Movement had been incubated. Rosa Parks’ attorney Fred Gray had his law office there, and a drug store on the drag helped coordinate carpools for the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It was our hometown’s equivalent of Greenwood Avenue. 

I was embarrassed. The so-called expert on black history didn’t even know the racial geography of his own hometown. But such knowledge gaps are common among many people who grew up in post-Civil Rights, post-urban renewal Montgomery, and other cities across the United States. Often, black people’s history of success has been wiped not only from memory but from the physical landscape. The old Monroe Street buildings were all demolished in the early 1990’s to make way for an office tower, parking lots, and a Holiday Inn.1

My conversation with Cicely reinforced one of the greatest revelations I had while writing my book, one that has largely been missing from common retellings of 20th century black history. There wasn’t one Black Wall Street--there were dozens of them. 

--

This month I published a new feature in Smithsonian magazine called “Those Who Stayed.” I wrote historical profiles of three Southern towns that had bustling black business districts just as impressive as Greenwood’s. Richmond was the home of Maggie Walker, the first black woman in the United States to open a bank. Durham’s North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company grew into one of the largest black-owned firms in the country. In Birmingham, A.G. Gaston managed a sprawling empire that included a bank, a funeral home, and a motel. 

Founders of the North Carolina Mutual Insurance Company in 1911

As a Southerner, I feel it’s important to talk about the success stories that were incubated here, even during the darkest years of Jim Crow. While it’s true that six million black people fled the South during the Great Migration, millions more stayed put. My own family reflects these diverging paths. My mom’s family migrated from Alabama to Chicago starting in the 1940s, but my dad’s family remained in rural Alabama throughout the segregation years. Many Luckersons still reside there. Though everything you’ve read probably says that living in rural Alabama would have been a nightmare in the mid-20th century, when my dad was growing up he and his siblings didn’t have to travel far to reach a “Black Wall Street” of their own. Kinfolks Corner, in the nearby city of Columbus, was a gathering spot every Saturday for black farmers who ventured into town to get their hair cut, buy groceries and connect with old friends.2 I never knew about this place until I started working on my book and asked my dad more about the world that reared him. 

Once I realized how widespread these lively black business districts were, it made it easier to see how their success fit patterns we can still emulate today. Most of the districts had financial institutions that re-invested money directly back into their communities--fraternal organizations, banks, insurance companies. Today, black-owned banks are the closest parallel. Organizations like Hope Credit Union, based in Jackson, Mississippi provide loans for homes and new businesses to people who are often excluded from the traditional banking system, just as they were a century ago. Banking with these institutions is a straightforward way to steer capital back towards black communities (I profiled Hope and its response to the pandemic a while back for Wired magazine).

Property ownership is another key to rebuilding black economic independence. Many black business districts were bought out or bulldozed in the 1970’s and ‘80s by commercial developers and urban renewal authorities. That’s one reason that only 3% of black households own commercial real estate today. But there are probably people in your city right now doing what they can to revitalize a hollowed-out black business district. In Greenwood, for example, the Terence Crutcher Foundation recently launched a capital campaign for Greenwood North, a planned community center and marketplace aimed at carrying on the Black Wall Street legacy. 

One final thing I noticed about all these neighborhoods--their entrepreneurs didn’t shy away from activism. Women like Maggie Walker organized protests and ran for political office while managing million-dollar enterprises. More conservative businessmen like Birmngham’s A.G. Gaston helped fund civil rights protests even if they didn’t agree on every point of strategy. These battles for equal rights were fought on the local level first, which helped build momentum for national legislation. There are playbooks buried in the past, if we’re willing to thumb through them. 

--

Still, there’s more to the history of these places than strategy lessons. Much more.

In April I visited Rochester, New York and got to meet with residents of the historic Clarissa Street. The once-thriving thoroughfare boasted famous local spots like the Pythodd Club, where black residents would go to listen to jazz on Sundays after church. But memories of Clarissa Street’s heyday have dimmed in the years since an interstate highway took out much of the district. In order to preserve the neighborhood’s history, an ongoing project called Clarissa Uprooted pairs local black teenagers with community elders to capture firsthand accounts of the community’s past. This intergenerational research is now on display at the main branch of the Rochester Public Library.

The results are powerful. On my tour of the exhibit, I saw photos of the businesses like the Pythodd Club that had given Clarissa Street life, and I heard oral histories from the people who packed out every storefront. One high school student, Sahiyra Dillard, created a virtual reality experience that layered archival photos and audio into a three-dimensional map of the neighborhood. The exhibit didn’t shy away from the destructive aspects of Clarissa Street’s story, either. I saw a 1966 issue of Rochester’s black newspaper calling urban renewal a “big steal,”  as well as parcel acquisition files from displaced property owners. The community wanted to show exactly how legally sanctioned upheaval took place on the ground level. 

This kind of knowledge can collapse the space between past and present for young people. When you find out there is more to sift through in your past beyond trauma, It’s an empowering feeling. “Usually when you talk to older people it gets boring,” a young interviewer named Briana Williams said in her conversation with Clarissa Street elder Moses Gilbert.  “But I never got bored listening to you guys’ stories…Actually learning something in my own city from my own people is just different. I soaked it up.”

These are just a few of the “Black Wall Streets” I’ve come across in my research and my travels. But there are so many more, hidden in newspaper archives, family photo albums, and warm reminisces at the kitchen table. If we’re not intentional about capturing these stories, they will be forgotten. I’d love to hear more from you about the “Black Wall Street” that was part of your hometown. A neighborhood doesn’t have to be as famous as Greenwood has become for its story to be worth telling. 

I got to take a tour of the Clarissa Street exhibit in Rochester with two members of the intergenerational research team: Kathy Sprague Dexter and Sahiyra Dillard.

Sources

An 1853 edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, printed after the book had become a national phenomenon

They said the book was poison. When Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was first published in 1852, the white Southern response was “nearly all outrage and invective,” according to the scholar Thomas Gossett. In Mobile, Alabama, vigilantes forced a bookseller to flee town after he featured the antislavery novel in his shop. At the University of Virginia, the book was burned on campus.1 In Maryland a free black man named Samuel Green was sentenced to ten years in prison for possessing the book, which was labeled “an abolition pamphlet…calculated to create discontent amongst the colored population.”2

Fueling the anger was fear. In the arguments over slavery, Southern slaveowners had custom and the law on their side. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, however, reset the terms of the debate. Here was a work that humanized enslaved people and illustrated the horrors slavery had wrought, while filtering its abolitionist argument through the lens of the Great American Novel. The slaveowners may have had Southern politicians and police patrols in their back pocket, but art and culture were harder to control. 

In the Southern white press, critics catastrophized about the impact Stowe’s work would have on the white youth, the generation expected to uphold the nation’s darkest institution.  "On every drawing room table of the North will be found engravings…illustrating Uncle Tom's Cabin, or the horrors of slavery,” read one editorial in an Alabama newspaper. “Over these pictures the children will cluster [in the] evenings, their innocent and tender minds drinking in the poison, while their parents are perhaps deep in some abolition speech work.”3

Uncle Tom’s Cabin was popular, accessible, and winding its way toward young people. That made it dangerous. 

----

Since the murder of George Floyd in 2020, black history has been in sharp focus in America. Horrific events like the Tulsa Race Massacre reached unprecedented national prominence, while Juneteenth is now at least widely acknowledged, if not exactly widely celebrated. As I spoke at colleges, bookstores and book festivals on my book tour for Built From the Fire last year, I met people of all ages and backgrounds in every corner of the country. They all wanted to know more. 

I spoke at at 15 colleges during the 2023-2024 school year about the history of Greenwood and my approach to writing and research. Here’s me at the University of Alabama with a journalism class and my old mentor, George Daniels.

But there’s been a bitter retrenchment from this history as well. Sixteen states have enacted anti-“critical race theory” legislation since 2021, and eight states have passed laws eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion offices from colleges. Three states are now denying college credit for AP African American Studies courses. This is as much about delegitimizing the work of largely black scholars and administrators as it is about shielding children from honest lessons about the legacy of race in America. The paranoia that led to the demonizing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin has returned in full force, sometimes with chillingly similar arguments--recall the controversy in Florida when the Board of Education adopted new lesson standards teaching that slaves adopted skills “for their personal benefit” while in bondage. 

Telling the truth about what happened in our country matters. It is not only because public policy debates regarding reparations and interstate removal plans are being shaped by interpretations of the past. It is not only because of the old “history repeats itself” maxim, which is more true than I gave it credit for as a kid. History expands our boundaries for what is possible, even as politicians try to herd us into a claustrophobic societal pen. When you learn that there were black people in my home state of Alabama who owned slaves in the 1800’s and others who were members of the Communist Party in the 1900’s, it begins to explode any idea of racial stereotype. Our humanity is expanded through these narratives--sometimes the revelations are heartening, other times harrowing. But better to be a person than a political prop.

Starting today, this newsletter is expanding its remit. Old heads know that the vast majority of the stories on Run It Back have been about expanding that possibility space in the world of black Oklahoma--writing about black cowboys, entrepreneurs, gambling kingpins, would-be oil tycoons, and the many victims of racial violence. Going forward, I’ll cast an eye all around the country for more black narratives that extend beyond our usual historical staging grounds, the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement. I want to help fill in the gaps in our story that so often don’t make it into school curricula or popular culture. 

I also want to make sure everything isn’t about trauma and the brutalities of racism. While interest in learning and teaching black history is rising, researchers at the John Hopkins Institute for Education Policy have found that these lessons dwell too much on the negative, often ignoring black achievement. A 2014 paper published in the Journal of Black Studies found that knowledge of black history correlates positively with self-esteem among black youth. Black people have accomplished quite a bit in our time on these shores; it’s vital we learn more of those stories too. 

A recent talk I gave at the St. Louis Public Library, where I was interviewed by Missouri Historical Society President Jody Sowell

I need help to execute this vision, so I’d like you to consider buying a paid subscription to Run It Back. Here are the different ways you can contribute: 

• A monthly subscription is $6 per month 

• An annual subscription is $60 per year

• You can contribute a larger amount of your choosing by signing up as a “Patron of History”

For the first 100 people who get an annual subscription or a Patron of History subscription, I’ll mail you a signed copy of the new paperback edition of Built From the Fire, personalized to your liking. Or I can gift you (or the person of your choosing) an audiobook copy via Audible if you prefer. When you subscribe, I’ll follow up via email to work out the particulars. 

Subscribe now

Even though I’m offering paid subscriptions for the first time, all the articles on Run It Back will remain free. I’m experimenting with a completely voluntary patron model so that this work can be widely available. My work could be of great use to teachers who are trying to include more black history lessons but need material that is accurate, evocatively written, and opens up space for intellectual discussion and debate. I strive to achieve all these things with my work. Please check out the new Education section of the Run It Back website, which organizes the archival issues by topic and provides PDF versions of all the articles to make easy classroom handouts. 

I’ll be updating the newsletter every other week from now on, as I did when Run It Back first launched. The pieces will be a mix of deeply researched historical narratives, essays reflecting on my approach to chronicling history, and some insight on my writing and research techniques as a budding historian. I’ll value impactful brevity (1,500 words or less per article) over sprawl. Expect more pieces that use moments in the past to shed light on what’s happening in our country today. I’m really excited about a series on the history of the black vote that I plan to run throughout the fall.

You don’t have to pay me a dime, but the money will help me continue to share my work in this format instead of hoarding it in books or on paywalled news websites. As an aging millennial (shudders) I have a soft spot for the open, collaborative internet of my teenage years. And I have big ambitions for Run It Back; the more folks that support this project, the easier it is to focus on this writing venue.

Thank you for reading, sharing, and subscribing. I hope to continue writing about black history for a long time to come. 

Sources

My voice was shaky. I talked too fast. I had probably not spoken in front of such a large audience since a play in elementary school. But the energy—from the audience, from the many people featured in the book, from my interlocutors Dreisen Heath and Stevie Johnson—was like a political rally mixed with a family reunion. People were rooting for me to succeed. They had not read the book yet, but they trusted that I had represented their story well. I and they became us.

That night focused on the past, as I walked through Greenwood’s history step by step. This week, we’re going to focus on the future.

On Thursday, May 30 at 6 p.m. at Rudisill Regional Library, I’ll be hosting my last major book event in Tulsa, the final leg of the Deep Greenwood Community Read. Instead of hearing me talk, you’ll mostly get to hear from the people who are building new things in and around Greenwood—storefronts, wellness initiatives, meeting spaces for black-owned businesses, DIY classrooms, and grassroots political movements. I hope you’ll walk away with a clearer sense of some of the programs you may have seen glancing headlines about, and some new ideas for how be part of building Greenwood’s future.

There will be two panels that I will moderate, one on entrepreneurship and the other on community building. Featured panelists include:

• Angela Brown, educator in the Black History Saturdays program

• Tiffany Crutcher, founder and executive director of the Terence Crutcher Foundation

• Regina Goodwin, Oklahoma state legislator for House District 73

• Cleo Harris, owner of Black Wall Street Tees & Souvenirs

• Shayla Pickett, Founder of P.O.I.S.E Health & Wellness

• Kuma Roberts, president of the Black Wall Street Chamber of Commerce

After the panels, attendees will have a chance to record short video testimonials explaining their own hopes for the future of Greenwood. These recordings will be saved in the Rudisill Regional Library archives as a time capsule of modern Greenwood.

Rudisill Regional Library is located at 1520 N Hartford Ave (just north of Carver Middle School). Refreshments will be served at the event.

This Thursday, for the next event in the “Deep Greenwood” series we’re going to revisit the summer of 2020, when the largest protest movement in the history of the United States unfolded. The talk be at 7 p.m. on April 11 at 101 E. Archer St. (formerly the Ahha building). I’ll be joined on stage by two people who played key roles in organizing and activating people that summer—Greg Robinson, a North Tulsa native and former mayoral candidate, and Adriana Laws, who has been leading protest movements in Oklahoma City since 2020 and now works as a political strategist.

Though the summer of 2020 touched every corner of the nation, Tulsa became an international flashpoint. Three back-to-back landmark events here got people to take to the streets—the murder of George Floyd, the 99th anniversary of the race massacre, and the relaunch of President Trump’s 2020 campaign in Tulsa on Juneteenth weekend. If you were here, you remember the energy, the danger, the joy, the fear, the possibility of that moment.

But part of my work as a writer is broadening people’s understanding of our politics beyond “moments.” This is also the work of activists and community organizers. So we’ll be exploring questions like: How do you create a bridge for citizens from protest to policy? What did activism in Greenwood look like before the modern era? For the folks who have been reading and learning since 2020, what can they do, right now, to tangibly make a difference? “Activist” and “protester” can sometimes be used as dismissive labels by politicians and within media. Some people feel nervous taking on those titles. But the question isn’t what you call yourself; it’s figuring out the ways you can be part of community building, rather than sitting on the sidelines.

It should a great talk. We’ll look back a little, but let’s also look forward. I hope to see you there.

Subscribe now

The Birth of Black Oklahoma

Black Oklahomans have lived just outside the frame of western myths for a long time. The first to move out west were the thousands of slaves who accompanied members of the Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole Tribes during the forced Native American removal to Oklahoma in the 1820’s and ‘30s. Enslaved people were forced to serve as hunters, nurses, and cooks throughout the brutal winter trip known as the Trail of Tears. After the Civil War, the slaves were freed and granted tribal citizenship. In the Creek and Seminole tribes, they farmed alongside Native Americans on communally owned land, served as Supreme Court justices in national governments, and acted as translators for tribal leaders in negotiations with U.S. officials. 

A second group of blacks--”state Negroes,” they were sometimes called--were part of the settler mythology that birthed terms like “Sooner” and “Boomer.” De'Leslaine Davis, a South Carolina native, was one of the few black people to participate in the very first land run on April 22, 1889, when the U.S. government opened up Oklahoma Territory’s “Unassigned Lands” to outside settlement. In the coming years thousands of other African Americans would participate in later land runs, joining Davis as “settlers” in a region that was already filled with both indigenous and black residents. Black members of the tribes and the new black settlers often resented each other. 

But white people, who were taking over the Twin Territories at an alarmingly fast rate, resented both groups more. When black tribal members were granted land allotments by the federal government along with their indigenous brethren, white con artists defrauded them of their land, purchasing huge tracts of black-owned property for less than $1 per acre. Meanwhile, as the Territories contemplated statehood, white politicians rejected efforts to make the new Oklahoma a symbol of racial equality and instead embraced a vicious Jim Crow regime. Black people--both tribal members and “state Negroes”--were banned from white schools, train cars, and even phone booths. 

The Rise of Greenwood

Amidst this dimming of opportunity out west, a new black community emerged on the northern edge of Tulsa. It was called Greenwood. Though popular myth says that Greenwood was a planned community, land records indicate that it emerged haphazardly over the course of about a decade and only slowly fell into black ownership. O.W. Gurley (pictured left above) was likely the first entrepreneur on Greenwood Avenue, opening his People’s Grocery Store there in 1905. Soon he was joined by entrepreneurs like J.B. Stradford (pictured right above), a real estate agent and lawyer, and Loula Williams, a theater and confectionery owner, among many others. 

Greenwood attracted ambitious black people who knew that Oklahoma was rich with oil and that it had a number of all-black towns where black independence was celebrated. Oil ultimately played only a tertiary role in black success--black workers were systematically excluded from the oil fields. And while all-black towns were plentiful, Greenwood was ultimately still a neighborhood in Tulsa, and its destiny was deeply bound to the actions of white people south of the railroad tracks. But the spirit of independence that defined all black Oklahoma was alive and well there. Greenwood residents melded Booker T. Washington’s vision of by-your-own bootstraps black capitalism with W.E.B. Du Bois’ fierce calls for racial justice. 

White Violence Grows

Outside the cocoon of Greenwood, Oklahoma was being wracked by racist whtie violence. In 1914, a 17-year-old black girl named Marie Scott was lynched in Wagoner, just 40 miles from Tulsa. Whte newspapers cheered the murder; Greenwood’s A.J. Smitherman, the fiery editor of the Tulsa Star, was one of the few public figures to speak out against it. Smitherman was a consistent and vocal opponent of mob law. He was not naive enough to assume that a trial for a black criminal suspect would be fair, but he understood that the elimination of even the pretense of justice would ultimately prove disastrous for his people. “These conditions are becoming very alarming and a serious calamity is sure to follow if something is not done to force all citizens to respect the law,” he wrote after Scott’s lynching. 

But mob law spread like a disease across the entire nation. In 1919, during what came to be known as the Red Summer, race riots in more than 30 U.S. cities, from Washington D.C. to Brisbee, Arizona, seized the country. Hundreds of people were killed, most of them black, and thousands of homes and businesses were damaged or destroyed. A victim of one of these riots from East St. Louis, Illinois actually spoke in Greenwood in 1920 about all that he had seen. 

The Massacre

An event as devastating as the Tulsa Race Massacre--thousands of homes destroyed, millions of dollars in damage accrued, potentially hundreds of lives lost--must be thought about on the scale of institutions, not individuals. But the inciting incident was an encounter between a pair of teenagers--Dick Rowland, a black shoe shine boy, and Sarah Page, a white elevator attendant. Rowland was arrested on a false rape charge on May 31, and black men in Greenwood, keenly aware of the history of lynching in thier own state and hometown, went to the courthouse armed and ready to protect him that evening.

An altercation broke out between the armed blacks and hundreds or thousands of whites who had gathered around the courthouse, likely to observe or participate in a potential lynching. Several people of both races were shot and killed in the streets of downtown Tulsa. Blacks retreated to Greenwood; whites broke into armories and hardware stores seeking weapons. They were preparing for something more. 

The police and National Guard, which were called in late into the night to bring order to the chaos, empowered a white mob to lay siege to Greenwood rather than protecting the neighborhood. J.M. Adkison, Tulsa’s police commissioner later estimated that 400 men were deputized on the night of the massacre. He even admitted that many men did not even have to provide their names to earn a commission. Adkison would later be identified as a member of the Ku Klux Klan. 

On the morning of June 1, 1921, at the sound of a clear whistle, a mob of whites estimated to be in the thousands crossed the railroad tracks that divided white and black Tulsa. They shot innocents, burned down buildings, and terrorized black individuals. More than 1,200 homes were destroyed and the entire central business district was destroyed. An unknown number of people were killed, but estimates reach as high as 300. The losses were, in many ways, incalculable.

How They Rebuilt

After the massacre, tents stretched across the burned-out prairieland for months. Though city leaders said they intended to rush to Greenwood’s aid, that never happened. Instead, Merritt J. Glass--another Klan member--launched a scheme to try to relocate blacks farther north in order to convert Greenwood into a train depot. Greenwood’s sharpest business and legal minds resisted the effort. 

Help came from black donors in other cities, the Red Cross, and Greenwood residents’ own determination to rebuild.  At the Red Cross relief headquarters set up in the neighborhood, sewing machines whirred as black women and girls were tasked with making clothes and bedding to replace all that had been burned by the white mob. Families banded together to build new homes with donated lumber. Many who had cobbled together somewhat comfortable lives in the heart of a Jim Crow regime were forced to live without heat, electricity and running water for months or even years. 

But the residents of Greenwood were tenacious, and by 1925 they were prepared to show the world how far they had come from disaster.

Read more about how the origins of Greenwood, the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, and the community’s astonishing rebirth in my narrative nonfiction book Built From the Fire. The book was named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times and the Washington Post, and it has been named a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, among other awards. Buy Built From the Fire on Amazon, Bookshop, or at your local bookseller.

Subscribe now

Photos courtesy Oklahoma Historical Society, Greenwood Cultural Center, and Wikimedia Commons. Sources available on individual issues of Run It Back.  

Going Deeper on Urban Renewal at OSU-Tulsa

On Thursday, Feb. 1, I’ll be joined by Tulsa photographer Don Thompson for a discussion about the origins of urban renewal in Greenwood and its wide-ranging impacts. Mr. Thompson, who came to Tulsa in his high school years in the 1950’s, was a young photojournalist in Greenwood when the bulldozers arrived not long after. His images of the era capture what the neighborhood was like on the precipice of its second destruction. 

The conversation will be moderated by Erica Townsend-Bell, director of the Center for African Studies at Oklahoma State University. The event begins at 7 p.m. at the OSU-Tulsa Campus Auditorium. Refreshments will be provided afterwards. 

Academic Tour, Part II

On Tuesday, Jan. 29, I’ll begin the second half of my academic book tour at the University of Arkansas’ Multicultural Center. There are plenty of parallels to Greenwood’s story in Arkansas. The town of Elaine was the site of its own race massacre in 1919. The director of Little Rock’s urban renewal program, which was protested by some black residents, eventually headed up urban renewal in Tulsa. A big part of what I try to do whenever I leave Tulsa is explain how what happened in Greenwood mirrored events in black communities across the country.

Later in the semester I’m headed to several more colleges. I’m especially looking forward to getting to talk to some of the student newspaper staff at these schools. When I was a freshman at the University of Alabama, back in the Ancient Times, I joined the school paper the night before classes started.

Festival Season

On Saturday, Feb. 17, I’ll be at the Savannah Book Festival talking about the process of building the historical world of Greenwood at the same time I was building relationships with people in the community. This is my first appearance as a speaker at a book festival, but I got to go to the Savannah festival last year as an attendee. I honestly didn’t know people went this hard for books–I met several people from around the country who make an annual trip to the event. It’s pretty awesome. And a great reminder that even though the writing process is quite solitary, books themselves are wonderfully communal. Full festival schedule is available here.

The Future of This Newsletter

I’ve had a bit of a writing hangover for the last few months. It’s a little intimidating trying to return to the (digital) page with a voice I know won’t be as polished as what I presented in Built From the Fire–especially with new readers who might not know that half the reason I started this newsletter was to source songs for my black country music playlist. But I think it’s important that I keep the rhythm of writing for a public going, even if the Next Big Thing is a ways off. 

So the newsletter will be exiting Promo Mode for the most part after this and getting back to talking about my research and offering small vignettes of black history. I’ll share some of what I’ve been reading as I explore new project ideas. And I’d like to collect some of my thoughts on what it’s been like being a capital-A Author for the last several months. Hopefully there are some unique things I’ve done with Built From the Fire that could be helpful for others trying to use books as a pathway to community and civic engagement. 

In closing: Bama’s Back. See y’all in the inbox or in your city throughout the year.

We were sitting in the office of the Oklahoma Eagle during my years of research of Built From the Fire, and Mr. Rucker was unfurling his amazing origin story for me. How he’d been born right there on Greenwood Avenue in the 1930’s, developed a love of music in the 1940’s, and become a fixture at Greenwood clubs and concert halls as a teenaged drummer in the 1950’s. For him, “Black Wall Street” was a hollow slogan, but Greenwood was an actual place.

“What is the identity of Wall Street per se?” Rucker continued. “If they understood what Wall Street represented, it wasn’t about entertainment. It wasn’t about the common way of living. There was no barbershop on Wall Street. There was no movie theater on the real Wall Street. So why do you embrace that that doesn’t belong to you? Why don’t you create your own thing?”

This weekend, on Saturday, Nov. 11, I’m inviting Mr. Rucker on stage alongside me for the second event in my “Deep Greenwood” series in Tulsa (check out the full schedule here). Washington Rucker is an acclaimed drummer who has traveled the world performing with artists like Stevie Wonder and Miles Davis. He’s also an inductee in the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame. We’ll be discussing the history of Greenwood’s nightlife and music scene in the 1930s through the 1950s. This culture is captured most vividly in Chapter 15 of Built From the Fire. But I only researched it; Mr. Rucker lived it.

I’m especially excited to begin doing some events that expand the aperture on Greenwood beyond the Tulsa Race Massacre. While the first event in the “Deep Greenwood” series focused on the leadup to the massacre and the event itself, the rest of the series will examine other aspects of Greenwood’s history and culture.

Saturday’s talk will take place at the Big 10 Ballroom, the famous North Tulsa music venue that once hosted artists like Ray Charles, Etta James, and B.B. King. Local television news reporter MaKayla Glenn from News on 6 will moderate, and poet Phetote Mshairi will open the event with a spoken word performance. Books will be on sale at the event, courtesy Fulton Street Books.

A live band will follow the book talk while a dinner buffet is served. All activities and food are free and open to the public. The event begins on Nov. 11 at 4 PM. If you’re in the area, please come out and bring a friend!

But you can’t escape where you’re from. And being born in Montgomery, I see now, was a gift. This place foisted a certain amount of unwanted wisdom on me about our nation’s knotty racial history. Those lessons allowed me to move to Tulsa, another city of contradictions, and write about it as if I’d been born there instead. In these two towns, unlike many places in America, you cannot hide from the past. 

This Friday, I’m excited for the chance to explore the legacies of my old home and my adopted one at the same time. At Montgomery’s Capri Theatre, I am helping to host a live concert, dubbed Built From the Fire: A Talking Book. The evening will combine music, spoken word, photography, and intimate discussions about the parallels between these two places. A team of artists and intellectuals from both cities have contributed their time and talent to make this happen. Here’s a taste:

While Montgomery and Tulsa are often defined in the public consciousness by the traumatic events in their history, we’re going to spend the evening talking about creation rather than destruction. Working on this project has allowed me to view my hometown with the same warmth, love, and generosity that I tried to bring to Greenwood when I arrived there. 

The event kicks off at 7:30 p.m. at the Capri. Tickets are $15 and include a signed copy of the book. You can purchase a ticket online here or at the door. 

Thanks to close third, a Montgomery-based arts organization, for spearheading this ambitious project. 

For those not in Montgomery, I’ll be sharing more here in the newsletter before the year is out about some of the community-building work I’ve been doing with close third and how it could be adopted for other projects in other cities. Forging local bonds outside of a political context is, I think, the key to relearning how to care for each other. I’m hoping we can figure out the path forward on this front together.

It wasn’t his first brush with organized violence. Mr. Ellis was born in January 1921 in Holdenville, Oklahoma; just a few months later, his family moved to the bustling neighborhood of Greenwood, which was attracting thousands of black families across the nation who were seeking a better life. “They had their own cabs, they had their own theaters,” Ellis recalled. “They had their own businesses. I guess the white people thought they were getting along pretty good so they tried to burn the black people’s houses down.”

On Monday, Ellis passed away in Colorado at 102 years old. He was one of three known living survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre.

I had a few opportunities to meet with Mr. Ellis in recent years. He was a warm soul who loved life. A proud veteran, he was always wearing a U.S. Army hat. I remember how practically giddy he was to meet Vanessa Williams when she came to Tulsa a few months ago. It makes me smile to know that he and his older sister, Viola Ford Fletcher, got the chance to visit Ghana two years ago, after Ms. Fletcher talked about her dream of going to Africa. 

But Mr. Ellis was also brought to tears on the floor of Congress in 2021 when he asked our governmental leaders why he, his sister, survivor Lessie Benningfield Randle and the thousands of race massacre descendants have been denied any semblance of justice for 102 years. “I fought for freedom abroad, even though it was ripped away from me at home, even after my home and my community were destroyed,” he said in his testimony. “I did it because I believed, in the end, America would get it right.”

Mr. Ellis, Ms. Fletcher, and Ms. Randle, who filed a high-profile lawsuit seeking restitution for the massacre in 2020, have become internationally known in recent years. They are ambassadors for a struggle for justice that stretches back to June 2, 1921, when Greenwood still smoldered. But it is deeply sad that three centenarians (Ms. Fletcher and Ms. Randle are 109 and 108) have spent the last few years in courtrooms and legislative chambers being met with indifference or neglect by our nation’s most powerful institutions. 

Pictured left to right: Lessie Benningfield Randle, Hughes Van Ellis, Viola Fletcher

The survivors went before Congress. The survivors have made multiple appearances at the Tulsa County courthouse, where their reparations lawsuit was recently dismissed by a local judge (the case is being appealed to the Oklahoma Supreme Court). Just last week, Ms. Fletcher and Ms. Randle were at the Oklahoma State Capitol to participate in a study hosted by Rep. Regina Goodwin on the multiple possible pathways toward justice that the state legislature could spearhead. 

I've watched the various halls of power kick responsibility for restitution around like a soccer ball. It often feels like they are waiting out the clock, and what I've learned in my last few years as a budding historian is that systems of oppression are incredibly patient.

So it's up to us to make the issues here in Tulsa urgent. Keep the memory of Mr. Ellis alive, and the specific repair that he fought for, even after national attention moves on from Tulsa. Human stories have a way of transforming people’s minds and hearts, even after the carries of those stories have left this world. That is one way we deny this city and country's insistence that what happened to black people here and across America is yesterday's news.

Rest in Peace to Mr. Hughes Van Ellis.

Tonight I’ll be exploring the second half of that equation in more detail. I’m kicking off the “Deep Greenwood” community read series at All Souls Unitarian Church at 6:30 p.m. I’ll be in conversation with Bryan Hembree, Director of Arts & Culture for the University of Arkansas Multicultural Center. We’ll be drawing parallels between Tulsa and Arkansas a century ago—a town called Elaine was the site of a vicious race massacre of its own in 1919. But we’ll also be bringing the conversation into the present day, discussing the effort to limit the teaching of black history in Arkansas classrooms and how that mirrors what’s been going on here in Oklahoma.

I hope to see many of my fellow Tulsans there tonight. For folks outside the city, I’ve developed a reading schedule for following along with the Deep Greenwood series as it progresses between now and May. I’m exploring some options for us to have some kind of online discussion/book club conversation while the Deep Greenwood series is unfolding, so please stay tuned for more info on that.

Thank you again for your support.