Reverse Underground Railroad history program set May 10

The Southern Delaware Alliance for Racial Justice will feature a presentation by Dr. Richard Bell titled Kidnapping & Terrorism: The Reverse Underground Railroad, at its online town hall meeting set for 7 to 8:30 p.m., Tuesday, May 10.

Bell is an Andrew Carnegie Fellow at the University of Maryland, and a frequent lecturer on C-Span and at the Smithsonian Institution.

In his recent book, “Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home,” Bell points out that two houses at the western edge of Sussex County were the control and command centers of the Reverse Underground Railroad’s most vicious group of conductors and station agents.

Flowing the opposite way from the Underground Railroad, the Reverse Underground Railroad was a multi-headed criminal enterprise. Various gangs, such as Sussex County’s Cannon-Johnson Gang, kidnapped free African Americans, often children, in the North and sold them into a lifetime of enslavement in the deep South.

Bell tells the gripping true story of five boys who were kidnapped in the North and smuggled into slavery in the South, and their daring attempt to escape and bring their captors to justice. Their ordeal, an odyssey that took them from the Philadelphia waterfront to the marshes of Mississippi and onward, shines a glaring spotlight on the Reverse Underground Railroad. It was a black-market network of human traffickers and slave traders who stole away thousands of legally free African Americans from their families in order to fuel slavery’s rapid expansion in the decades before the Civil War.

SDARJ members have been working to get this horrendous history properly curated and exposed. At the town hall meeting, a major advance in that effort will be announced, thanking the high-ranking public officials who have listened and acted on this request. Leaders of the effort will discuss next steps in advancing public recognition of these historical truths, including the good, bad, unfortunate, happy and sad.

The alliance has arranged for anyone purchasing Bell’s book from Browseabout Books to receive a signed copy.

To learn more or register for the town hall, go to sdarj.org, or go to eventbrite.com and search Reverse Railroad.