The East Side Freedom Library invites you to a presentation of “Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and their Astonishing Odyssey Home” with author Richard Bell, Associate Professor of History, University of Maryland.

Monday, February 24, 2020, 7pm

In 1825 in Philadelphia, the supposed cradle of liberty, five young, free black boys fell into the clutches of the most fearsome gang of kidnappers and slavers in the United States. Lured onto a small ship with the promise of food and pay, they are instead met with blindfolds, ropes, and knives. Over four long months, their kidnappers drove them overland into the Cotton Kingdom to be sold as slaves. Determined to resist, the boys formed a tight brotherhood as they struggled to free themselves and find their way home. Their ordeal—an odyssey that took them from the Philadelphia waterfront to the marshes of Mississippi and then onward still— shines a glaring spotlight on the Reverse Underground Railroad, 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. The story of their ordeal will lead us to reconsider the place of slavery and freedom in our country’s history.

Rick Bell is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland. He earned his BA from the University of Cambridge in England, and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He has won more than a dozen teaching awards, including the 2017 University System of Maryland Board of Regents Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching. He has held research fellowships at Yale, Cambridge, and the Library of Congress, and he has received the National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar award. His first book was We Shall Be No More: Suicide and Self-Government in the Newly Independent United States (Harvard University Press, 2012).

Free and open to all

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