The Film: Interview Transcripts: James Oliver Horton

James Oliver Horton, Ph.D., historian on
the role of free blacks
The free black community provided services that people needed, but could not depend on, from their local government or their state government.  Free black communities provided all kinds of services, such as aid to widows and orphans.  They provided the kind of thing that we now like to think of as unemployment insurance.  All the services that we think of as services provided by government to people in the 20^th or the 21^st Century were services provided within the community by community members.  These services were sponsored by the black church, but then there were also specific organizations, associations, fraternities, sororities that provided specific aid to people in need.  These free black communities were also tremendously important on the Underground Railroad, because often runaway slaves came into an area of the North knowing no one and so, I mean, this doesn’t take a great imagination that if you were a runaway slave and you come into an area and there is a group of black people living in that area, these might be the people to whom you will turn for assistance. And often that was the case, and the free black community was terribly important in taking in slaves and protecting slaves and passing them along to more organized parts of the anti-slavery movement or the Underground Railroad, which might eventually get that slave on to Canada.

We have to remember that by the time of the Civil War, there were four million slaves, about a half a million free blacks.  If you were a free black person, it was practically impossible that you wouldn’t have a family member or a friend, some connection to slavery.  And so, for these free black people, slavery and working against slavery was more than a matter of ideology.  Obviously, these people believed in freedom.  They believed in all the things that America stands for, but they also had very personal reasons for participating in the anti-slavery movement and the Underground Railroad, and so there was a real personal connection between free blacks and slaves that went beyond the kind of philosophical commitment to the broader issues of freedom and liberty.  I have read letters written by school children that talked about their commitment to their families in slavery.  School children in the North, who were free, talking about their commitment to their, in some cases, mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers still in slavery.  When you read these letters and hear these kids talking about how concerned they are that their relatives and their friends be allowed the same kind of freedom that they have, then you start to understand how personal this anti-slavery movement, how personal the activities of the Underground Railroad, how personal these things were.  To free blacks at all levels of society, of all ages, and so it was more than simply just an organized group of free black leaders. 

economic impact of slavery

inter-racial alliances

the decision to escape

importance of
Western Pennsylvania

John Brown

black patriotism

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