Estevanico became an explorer of the American Southwest, traveling with Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Andrés Dorantes de Carranza, and Alonso del Castillo Maldonado, the remaining survivors, through New Spain (what is now the US Southwest and northern Mexico) to Mexico City to meet up with Spanish forces. Estevanico and the other survivors became medicine men after living with another Native American tribe, and the four men became known as healers, earning the nickname “The Children of the Sun.” Estevanico also became fluent in several Native languages.
Estevanico led a reconnaissance party back through the Southwest for the viceroy of Mexico. But it’s believed he was killed by the Zuni in their city of Hawikuh in 1539 because his trademark medicine gourd was trimmed with owl feathers, a bird that’s thought to be a symbol of death to the Zuni.
Harriet Ann Jacobs escaped from slavery to protect herself from sexual threats put forth by her owner’s father, Dr. James Norcom. She lived as a fugitive for ten years before she was freed by Cornielia Grinnell Willis, the second wife of her employer, poet and editor Nathaniel Parker Willis. She became an abolitionist and an author, writing her autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, which included the sexual trauma she and other Black female slaves experienced from their masters. Unfortunately, the book would fall from the public eye until the 1960s and 1970s, when the civil rights movement and women’s movement gained traction.
Hannah Crafts, also known as Hannah Bond, is the author of The Bondwoman’s Narrative, thought to be the first novel by an African American woman, as well as the only one written by a fugitive slave woman. The novel was written in the late 1850s but was only rediscovered and published in 2002 after Harvard professor Henry Lewis Gates Jr. purchased the manuscript.
The slave “Fed” renamed himself John Brown and became an author with his book of memoirs, Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Now in England. The book, which was published in London in 1855, contained the dictated accounts of Brown (written by the secretary of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society’s secretary, Louis Alexis Chamerovzow) and how he managed to escape from Georgia to England. His memories include abuse, loss, familial separation, medical experimentation, and more. Brown eventually lived a full life in London, marrying a local woman and working as an herbalist. He died in 1876.
Jordan Winston Early was born as a slave in 1814 in Virginia and lived with his maternal aunt, an astronomy-loving uncle, and an older woman known as “Aunt Milly” on his plantation before he became a minister at the young age of twelve. When he and his family were taken to Missouri by their masters in 1826, he was emancipated and began his journey toward becoming an African Methodist Episcopal Church preacher in 1836. After expanding the AME Church in St. Louis, Illinois, Indiana, New Orleans, and Tennessee, Early became a deacon in 1838 and established the first AME Church in St. Louis in 1840.
Jupiter Hammon is known as the first African American poet to be published in America. Born into slavery in New York on Henry Lloyd’s estate, Hammon was educated along with his master’s children and worked with his master at his businesses. His first work, An Evening Thought, also known as An Evening Prayer and An Evening’s Thought: Salvation by Christ, with Penitential Cries, was published in 1760 and used to preach to Lloyd’s slaves. In 1787, he spoke to New York’s Black community at the African Society of New York City called “An Address to the Negroes in the State of New York.” Despite his celebrity status, Hammon was never freed. He was buried in an unmarked grave on his master’s estate.
Lewis Adams, formerly a slave in Alabama, took his passion for education to found the Tuskegee Institute, now known as Tuskegee University, one of the prominent HBCUs in America. Born in 1852, Adams became proficient in reading and writing and became a polyglot even though he had no formal education. He was a Jack of all trades as an expert in tin-smithing, shoe-making, and harness-making. His Tuskegee Institute, which opened in 1881 as the Tuskegee State Normal School, came at the right time for freed Blacks after the Civil War and during Reconstruction, when Black people were in need of gaining different skills to make a living. To show just how interconnected Black leaders were throughout history, the first principal of the Tuskegee Institute was none other than scholar Booker T. Washington.
Omar ibn Said was a wealthy Senegalese Islamic scholar and writer who was captured and enslaved in 1807 in North Carolina. Even though he was never able to return to his Senegalese home of Futa Tooro, Said became an author in the US, writing a series of books on theology and history and an autobiography that was published after his death in 1864. His account of his life in America includes escaping from his first owner, an abusive man named Johnson. He was put in jail and was later recovered by North Carolina governor John Owen and his brother Jim, whom Said described as godly people. He converted to Christianity and remained with his owner’s family until his death.
Paul Jennings was a slave who served President James Madison and his family in the Madison family home of Montpelier and in the White House. Jennings’ memoir, A Colored Man’s Reminiscences of James Madison, is thought to be the first memoir about life at the White House. It also provided one of many written accounts of how slaves interacted with their owners, particularly those whose morals seem antithetical to the tenet of slavery. Jennings was later able to buy his freedom via statesman Daniel Webster, and, after gaining his freedom and making a living as a “laborer” by completing clerical tasks, he visited Madison’s widow, Dolley Madison, now broke, and provided “small sums of money from [his] own pocket” if he thought she needed it.
Solomon Northup is known to us today because of Chiwetel Ejiofor’s dramatic performance in Twelve Years a Slave. Of course, like in any film, Northup’s account is dramatized for effect. That doesn’t mean that the horrors Northup lived through were any less vile or terrifying. The real man behind the film character was an abolitionist, professional violinist, and landowner in New York. Northup was born free as the son of a freed slave and a free woman but was later held hostage in slavery for twelve years, living through unthinkable conditions. His account of his enslavement furthered the abolitionist case in the US and fueled Northup’s work with the Underground Railroad as well as his lectures throughout the country. In fact, many freed Black people were kidnapped into slavery, so much so that the exact number of victims is unknown. Sadly, many didn’t have the happier fate of Northup, who managed to escape. Many who were sold back into slavery were never heard from again because of the nefarious ways their histories as free individuals were erased. In many instances, their freedom papers were either destroyed or dismissed by judges as being forged, White witnesses refused to testify against their neighbors who were committing these crimes, and much more.
Slavery was much easier to excuse by the masses before the image of Gordon, who became known as “Whipped Peter,” circulated throughout the nation. Gordon’s influential status was established in 1863 after he came to a Union encampment in Baton Rouge. His harrowing escape was just part of the violence he had endured as a slave, which included being whipped nearly to death. The photograph of his raised scars, which traveled the length of his back and were accumulated over years, were revealed during a medical examination and became one of the most widely circulated photographs about slavery at the time, strengthening the abolitionist movement and putting the importance of the Civil War into perspective; as much as the argument could be made about the war being about “economics,” it was clear that there were human rights at stake. His photo propelled other Black abolitionist leaders, like Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, to either pose for pictures for circulation or sell them to raise awareness and funds for abolitionist initiatives.
The Bridge to Freedom
Incredibly, there were also enslaved people who lived long enough to not only be emancipated, but to also make headlines in the mid-1900s.