Today's episode of the AllThoughtIsBlackThought podcast is a tribute to these little-known Black freedom fighters. Click HERE to listen!
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William Parker was a 29-year-old Black man who had escaped slavery in Maryland. He was a leader in a Black mutual defense and resistance network in southern Pennsylvania.
"[We] had formed an organization for mutual protection against slaveholders and kidnappers," Parker told the Atlantic Monthly in 1866, "and had resolved to prevent any of our brethren being taken back into slavery, at the risk of our own lives…Whether the kidnappers were clothed in legal authority or not, I did not care to inquire, as I never had faith nor respect for the Fugitive Slave Law."
The law that Parker was talking about had been passed in 1850. It was written by slaveholders in Congress. It deputized all white people as slavehunters of all Black people anywhere in the u.s.a. Even if the Black people were legally free, the law basically allowed white people to easily get away with kidnapping and selling us into slavery in the south before our loved ones even knew we were missing. Some local white people in border states like Pennsylvania even pretended to befriend escapees, gaining information that they would turn around and sell to slavehunters, allowing their Black "friends" to be returned to slavery.
Realizing the law was not protecting us, Black people (and some white people) organized to defend ourselves. Members of Parker's network stood ready to fight off kidnappers at all times and with any tools or weapons they had if a community member needed help. The network did not work alone. They worked with a network of spies headed by Black abolitionist William Still who tracked the movements of slave kidnappers and helped escapees safely reach freedom in Canada.
Parker recounted an incident when his network learned that a group of slavehunters had kidnapped a young Black woman:
"[A Black man] sounded the alarm, that 'the kidnappers were at Whitson's, and were taking away his girl.' The news soon reached me, and with six or seven others, I followed them. We proceeded with all speed to a place called the Gap-Hill, where we overtook them, and took the girl away. Then we beat the kidnappers, and let them go. We learned afterwards that they were all wounded badly, and that two of them died in Lancaster, and the other did not get home for some time. Only one of our men was hurt, and he had only a slight injury in the hand.”
In 1849, four Black men escaped from Maryland slaveholder Edward Gorsuch's plantation and made it to Parker's safehouse in Christiana, Pennsylvania. In 1851, Gorsuch paid a white informant who claimed to have knowledge of the escaped men's whereabouts and led Gorsuch and a posse of u.s. marshals and slavehunters to Parker’s house. They arrived at dawn on September 11.
A Black member of William Till’s spy network, Samuel Williams, had followed the slavehunter posse for days. He informed William Parker and his wife, Eliza, that the kidnappers were coming. When Gorsuch arrived, Eliza Parker blew a horn to alert the Black self-defense network to come together. The kidnappers shot at her but missed.
The kidnappers tried quoting law and biblical scripture to get the men to surrender themselves, all to no avail. They almost succeeded when one of the escaped men (Alexander Pinckney) got shook and offered to surrender. Eliza grabbed her corn knife and threatened to cut his throat if he tried. (Several of Eliza's close relatives living nearby were escapees, too, and she knew she had too much "skin in the game" to go out without a fight.)
Gorsuch, the slaveholder, tried to convince the men that he would not punish them if they surrendered. The Parkers pretended to consider his offer, delaying the kidnappers until the members of the self-defense network had them surrounded.
At that point, the u.s. marshals gave up and began to run away. They advised Gorsuch to do the same, but the slaveholder persisted: "My property I will have, or I'll breakfast in hell."
The escapees and the mutual defense network obliged him: They beat and shot him to death. They also severely injured his son with shotgun blast in his side.
William Parker and the 4 men escaped to Canada by the time the marshals returned in force. Frederick Douglass assisted the escape, and even gave William Parker the pistol Gorsuch drew during the fight. Eliza Parker and the children later joined William in Canada.
Oh, and remember Alexander Pinckney, the escapee who had tried to surrender? He went on to join the famous the Massachusetts 54th regiment, fighting against slavery in the u.s. civil war.
DID YOU EVER LEARN ABOUT THIS IN SCHOOL? IF NOT, WHY NOT? WHAT DO YOU THINK IT WILL TAKE FOR REAL-LIFE STORIES OF BLACK RESISTANCE TO BE TAUGHT? AND WHAT ARE WE DOING TO CREATE NEW REAL-LIFE STORIES OF RESISTANCE TO OPPRESSION TODAY?
SOURCES:
Thomas P. Slaughter, Bloody Dawn: The Christiana Riot and Racial Violence in the Antebellum North (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)
William Parker, "The Freedman’s Story"
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1866/02/the-freedmans-story/308737/
John Anderson, "The Christiana Riot of 1851"
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/christiana-riot-1851/
