"If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong." — Abraham Lincoln
BOSTON, April 30, 2010 — Sometimes fact is stranger than fiction. Consider, for example, the life of business magnate and philanthropist, civil rights activist and effective director-general of the Philadelphia-based Underground, William Still (1821-1902). Still transformed (with some notable help from his wife, Letitia) his home into a "hotel," whereby he/they fed, clothed and sheltered 95% of all the fugitive slaves who arrived at Philadelphia until trains were found to transport them northward. Imagine having a few houseguests over for the weekend, but they never leave. Strange as it may sound, Still believed passionately in "Mi casa es su casa." But his reasoning was not so strange. And William Still and the Underground Railroad: Fugitive Slaves and Family Ties author Lurey Khan should know as her mother was the granddaughter of Still's brother. Quoting from Still's own remarkable records, Khan outlines her family's contributions to not only the abolitionist movement during the 19th century, but the Women's Rights cause as well.
William Still and the Underground Railroad (published by iUniverse) begins at the close of 18th century, when a slave named Levin Steel confronted his slave master demanding to be a free man. After paying for his freedom, Steel found his way to the Pines of Burlington County, New Jersey, and was later joined by his self-emancipated (runaway slave) wife, Charity. And it was their emancipated union that produced the first line of freeborn children, the ancestors of the book's central character, William Still. Still's youthful indoctrination into the abolitionist movement was the function of the evangelism of the white abolitionist leader named Benjamin Lundy, a white pioneer Quaker abolitionist from New Jersey who worked with evangelical Christians in the militant American Anti-Slavery Society in 1834. It was James McKim, the Agent in charge of the Philadelphia branch of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, who groomed young William Still to assume the management of this eastern hub of the Underground Railroad. Running strangely parallel to Still's devotion to the emancipation movement was the fact that his siblings were amassing an impressive list of professional, entrepreneurial, social welfare, and legal accomplishments — all under slavery's shadow in the South. And the strange entwined interests of slavery and feminism in the abolitionist movement? An interesting fact that was strangely left out of American History textbooks. Khan knows the facts!
About the Author
While Lurey Khan may claim the New Jersey town of Camden as her birthplace, her true roots sink deep into one of the oldest cities in the US — Boston. Growing up at the center of Boston's African-American community in lower Roxbury, Khan experienced first-hand society's color-conscious attitudes at the end of the Jim Crow segregation era. During her teenage years at Girls' High School, Khan wrote articles on abolitionism and women's rights for the award-winning school paper Distaff. She currently lives and writes in her studio apartment within the Piano Craft Guild, just halfway between the street she grew up on and the now razed Girls' High School lot.
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