Frederick Douglass, the Underground Railroad and Alternate Forms of Fugitivity

• In Event: Politics of Suffering and Resistance: Understanding and Responding to Trauma

Abstract

From Black Lives Matter organizers to migrant communities building sanctuary to feminist networks organizing reproductive healthcare, fugitive politics are emerging in response to systems of trauma and suffering. And yet, when we reach back to draw inspiration from enslaved fugitives, the U.S. political imagination is dominated by stories of total escape. The recent proliferation of books and films depicting escape on the Underground Railroad exemplifies this urge to imagine fugitivity as getting all the way out. However, this stylized myth of the individual hero escaping to the free North is not an accurate depiction of the ways that most enslaved people in the U.S. escaped slavery. Nor is total escape from many contemporary forms of trauma and suffering possible.
What would it look like, instead, to flee trauma and suffering when you cannot get very far away? Although fugitivity is often understood through the story of complete escape on the Underground Railroad, there were many more enslaved people who fled within territories of violence. Those who could not get “all the way out” fled in a variety of ways, resisting the violence of enslavement through flight even without fully exiting. For example, enslaved women fled for short periods and returned to their children and families. Whole communities were established in swamps, building small cities of resistance. Enslaved people forged new identities among free Black communities who hid them in plain sight. And runaway advertisements lamented fugitives who “lurked” on the outskirts of plantations, not fully leaving but inhabiting ambiguous spaces between slavery and freedom.
I argue that a close examination of “flight within” can reveal a fugitive politics of relationality. Through a close reading of 19th-21st century texts, primarily slave narratives, Black political thought, and historical evidence, I move beyond the exceptionalism and individualism often perpetuated by mythical retellings of escape on the Underground Railroad to explore how flight within territories of enslavement can enrich contemporary politics of resistance to systems of violence. I argue that accounting for a diversity of modes of fugitivity other than total escape can allow for a more capacious understanding of fugitivity as including flight within. In doing so, I expand the literature on fugitivity to better account for the more ambiguous, temporary, and tenuous modes of flight in which particularly vulnerable fugitives, such as enslaved women, engaged.
Fugitivity is a form of resistance to a system of oppression that takes the specific form of flight. Within the broader scholarship on modes of resistance to and refusal of violence and suffering, from Indigenous theories of refusal to new work on civil disobedience and resistance, fugitivity in particular has been the subject of increasing scholarly debate in political theory and related fields. This project contributes to this growing conversation by highlighting how flight within territories and systems of violence can generate new ways of thinking through our contemporary politics of crisis.
In this paper, I analyze fugitivity as escape out of slave states on the Underground Railroad. I draw on the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and historical research to trace the ways the myth of total escape on the Underground Railroad have contributed to the American political imagination. I show how this hegemonic narrative of complete escape is a powerful American political myth created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to emphasize individual heroism, masculinity, a promised land of freedom, and the sacrifices of white abolitionists. This myth distorted what resistance actually looked like, framing it as an exceptional and individual act of heroism and reinforcing the American story of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Frederick Douglass’ autobiographies both encapsulate and undermine this dominant narrative, revealing the incompleteness of escape and continued precarity of fugitives even while emphasizing individualism and masculinity. Recent work on Douglass’s conception of fugitivity by Nick Bromell (2021), Ange-Marie Hancock (2018), and others have emphasized vulnerability and restorative care. Further, recent work by historians has uncovered the inaccuracies of the traditional narrative, showing that in reality, the Underground Railroad was a flexible network of relational sanctuary, not a centralized organization run by white abolitionists, and safety was precarious even in “free” territories. However, even this revised story still focuses on total exit all the way out of slave states, neglecting flight within them. By critically analyzing the dominant narrative of the Underground Railroad, I show both that it did not capture most of the fugitivity that American escapees engaged in and that it underestimated how relational (vs. masculinist, individualist, and bootstrapist) the Underground Railroad was.

Author

• Lucy Britt, Bates College