“BLACK HISTORY MONTH - DEUTERONOMY 23:15”
In January,
1993, we had the privilege at Oakhurst of having a convicted felon preach in
Sunday worship. He had just been
elected Moderator of our denomination’s General Assembly the summer before, and
many people grumbled that we now had a criminal as our Moderator. His name is John Fife, and his crime? He had helped people escape from torture and
slavery and execution. He had helped to transport people from El Salvador and
Guatemala into this country and into Canada, through his church network in
Arizona. His conviction was later
overturned, but we were proud to have him in our pulpit, because he and many
others were part of a long tradition in the USA known as the Underground Railroad.
I had never
heard the verse that is the title of this week’s blog before 2000. I sort of knew Deuteronomy, but it is mostly
laws, so I had not paid attention to this verse until it leaped out to me from
the title page of a book entitled “The Underground Railroad.” I was not surprised that I had never learned
this verse in Sunday school as I grew up.
I had learned a lot of verses and stories, but this was not one of
them. The verse in the King James
Version that I first encountered it is: “Thou shalt not deliver unto his master
the servant that has escaped from his master unto thee.” In modern English, it is “Slaves who have
escaped to you from their owners shall not be given back to them.”
I
encountered this verse on the title page of the book published by William Still
in 1872, and even in 2000 when I first saw it, I was incredulous. I thought that it was some “liberal”
manipulation of the text, even though I agreed with its sentiments. If that was in the Bible, why had I never
heard of it? I looked it up, and yep,
there it was, plain as day, no manipulation, no twisted text. It only took a moment to realize why I had
never heard of it in Sunday school – I was raised and taught by people who
lived in neo-slavery, who continued to benefit from the legacy of slavery and
neo-slavery (which ended in 1965).
Still, I could not believe that those who said that they took the Bible
literally had never promoted this verse.
William
Still was a conductor on the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia. He had been born in freedom in New Jersey to
a woman who had escaped slavery but had to leave some of her children
behind. He helped hundreds, if not
thousands, of people escaping slavery.
People fleeing slavery came through Philadelphia daily, often coming up
the Delaware River or on foot from nearby Maryland. It was the route that Frederick Douglass and
Harriet Tubman took. Indeed Harriet
Tubman stayed with Still and often dropped off passengers on the way up. Later the great Ida Wells would stay at
Still’s home also as she worked in her anti-lynching campaign – so he had two
of the greatest women of the 19th century in his home! William Still was assisted by the fact that
even after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the state of Pennsylvania had declared
that people of African heritage on its soil were free people, and it put them
in direct conflict with the Fugitive Slave Act.
Unlike many
on the Underground Railroad, Still kept notes and records. It was a dangerous thing to do because they
contained the names of contacts and could do great harm if confiscated. William Still hid them well, because he
wanted future generations to now of the bravery of so many people. He published the notes in 1872 as “The
Underground Railroad,” and it is basically the words and stories of people
escaping slavery. It is one of the
primary sources for a history of the Underground Railroad (UR). He was deemed a hero for his work on the UR,
but he always made it clear that the brave ones were the people escaping slavery,
not the conductors. Indeed, he said that
the conductors were only doing what they should have been doing. But, I say “thanks to William Still and so
many others.” May we pick up the mantle
of William Still and Harriet Tubman and Ida Wells and John Fife and Amzie Moore
and Daisy Bates – more to come on Moore and Bates later!
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