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"While slavery was horrible and people were always running away, around the 1840s there became a more organised form of resistance," Whitehead told BBC Radio Four. Revered as "The Moses of Her People", Tubman relocated to Pennsylvania but went back to the South on at least 19 occasions and helped over 300 fugitives flee to freedom ( BBC).Ĭolson Whitehead explains the origin of Underground Railroad, and how it inspired the premise for his award-winning novel. Born into slavery, Tubman escaped a plantation in Maryland in 1849, only to return several times to rescue others. Harriet Tubman, the abolitionist and political activist, is considered the most famous conductor of the Underground Railroad. Most of the operators led ordinary lives as farmers, teachers, business owners or ministers - not all were openly abolitionists, particularly in the earlier days.
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The Railroad is believed to have been most active between 1810 and the start of the Civil War in 1862, and the network consisted of "conductors", the people who guided fugitive people on the run, and "stationmasters", those who hid the absconders in schoolhouses or in their homes, which were code named "stations", "safe houses", and "depots". The network is estimated to have enabled over 100,000 people to escape slavery ( BBC).
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Opposition to slavery began to deepen in the early 1800s, and so empathetic parties began to develop and organise a secret network to help guide enslaved people out of the Deep South and into the free states of North - or for those who didn't trust America - into free Canada. I hope it can re-contextualise rather than reinforce stereotypes about my ancestors that have been allowed to persist over the decades." The true story of the Underground Railroad
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"There's a great responsibility that comes with that. "This is the most triggering material I've ever had to wrestle with," Jenkins told The Observer recently. The story follows the epic journey of resilient heroine Cora (played by Thuso Mbedu), a young enslaved girl who escapes a plantation and uncovers the underground railway, stopping off on the steam locomotive at various hazardous Southern States in a desperate a bid for freedom.Īlthough the first episode of The Underground Railroad features graphic and violent depictions of torture and punishment, Jenkins is said to have softened Whitehead's pages soaked in trauma and brutality, so as to avoid making something exploitative or triggering for viewers. Oscar winner Barry Jenkins, director of Moonlight, is now bringing Whitehead's brilliant concept to our small screens, adapting the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel into a sprawling 10-part drama for Amazon. Whitehead's figurative, fantasy railroad features an underground platform accessed through a trapdoor, an elusive, dilapidated box car being pulled across subterranean tracks by a steam locomotive, and a semi-mythic conductor on board. In the novel The Underground Railroad, author Colson Whitehead ingeniously makes literal the metaphorical network of the Underground Railroad, the 19th century network of clandestine channels and safe houses created by abolitionists to help free enslaved people from the Deep South into the free states of the North.