free african americans

"Benjamin Banneker was a self-educated mathematician, scientist, astronomer, and civil rights advocate. Banneker achieved many amazing things throughout his lifetime. He wrote almanacs, mapped the stars, and corresponded with Thomas Jefferson, just to name a few. Banneker was a man ahead of his time"--Provided by publisher.

In 1851, Elizabeth Parker, a free black child in Chester County, Pennsylvania, was bound and gagged, snatched from a local farm, and hurried off to a Baltimore slave pen. Two weeks later, her teenage sister, Rachel, was abducted from another Chester County farm. Because slave catchers could take fugitive slaves and free blacks across state lines to be sold, the border country of Pennsylvania/Maryland had become a dangerous place for most black people.

On Independence Day, 1861, the schooner S.J. Waring set sail from New York on a routine voyage to South America. Seventeen days later the schooner limped back into New York's harbor with the ship's Black steward, William Tillman, at the helm. The Waring had been overtaken by a marauding crew of Confederate privateers. The white sailors got along well with their Southern captors, but free Black man William Tillman was very aware of the fate that awaited him in the slave markets of the South. Nine days after capture, Tillman killed three officers of the privateer crew and took the ship's wheel and pointed it back to New York. He had no experience as a navigator, only one other helper, and the Atlantic sea to contend with. After five perilous days at sea, the Waring was home and Tillman was recognized as a hero for not only getting the best of the Confederate crew, but for saving the ship and its contents for the Waring's owners.

Details the history of Washington, D.C., in 1835, in which race riots exploded as whites, fearing a slave rebellion, attacked the property of free blacks and resulting in two criminal trials both prosecuted by Francis Scott Key.

Presents excerpts from the diary of Charlotte Forten, a free African American teenager who lived in Massachusetts before the Civil War.

Presents a comprehensive history of slavery in New York prior to and during the American Revolution, and examines their relationship to the city's economic and social growth.

Presents a short biography about ex-slave Clara Brown who traveled to Colorado to begin a new life and look for her daughter who was sold as a small child, and describes how she became rich enough to help other freed slaves after the Civil War to also begin new lives.

Piano player Benjamin January becomes a scapegoat for the prominent men of nineteenth-century New Orleans when he volunteers to arrange a meeting between old friend Mademoiselle Madeleine and her husband's Creole mistress Angelique Crozat, and ends up being one of the last people to see Crozat alive.

Describes an incident in the life of John Parker, an ex-slave who became a successful businessman in Ripley, Ohio, and who repeatedly risked his life to help other slaves escape to freedom.