Instead of using the secret routes along the Underground Railroad to find freedom in the North, thousands of enslaved Black people fled to free Black communities in Southern slaveholding states.
A portrait of Harriet Tubman in 1878.
Library of Congress/Getty Images
Harriet Tubman has long been known as a conductor on the Underground Railroad leading enslaved Black people to freedom. Less known is her role as a Union spy during the Civil War.
A march along historic South Road Street in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, protesting the police shooting of Andrew Brown Jr.
AP Photo/Steve Helber
Many Americans first heard of Elizabeth City, North Carolina, when protests began after Andrew Brown Jr. was killed by sheriff’s deputies. But the city has a long history of fighting racial injustice.
Thuso Mbedu is plays Cora in The Underground Railroad, a woman on the run to freedom in the north of the US.
Kyle Kaplan/Amazon Studios
At once tender and horrific, The Underground Railroad’s use of visuals and sound beautifully portray the reality of slavery and its legacy in the US today.
Making the series changed Barry Jenkins’ views on how his ancestors should be described and depicted.
Atsushi Nishijima/Amazon Studios
Director Barry Jenkins’ delicate dance with beauty and suffering seeks to create a fuller picture of the world Black Americans – then and now – inhabit.
Tubman, left, with a few of the former slaves she helped escape.
Bettmann/Getty Images
Spirituals were created out of the experience of enslaved people in the US. They weren’t songs of anger – but of an abiding belief in the victory of good over evil.
Networks of support in solidarity of migrants on the move have grown across Europe and North America.
L.M. for Moving Europe, 2015
Among Tubman’s most daring feats was helping slaves escape. She believed she went into trances and had visions. These, to her, were God’s way of guiding her, which made her quite fearless.
Leader of Research Group “The Production of Knowledge on Migration” at the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies, Osnabrück University, Osnabrück University