Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in African American Studies
Episode: Viola Franziska Müller, "Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South" (UNC Press, 2022)
Description: In Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South (UNC Press, 2022), Viola Franziska Müller examines runaways who camouflaged themselves among the free Black populations in Baltimore, Charleston, New Orleans, and Richmond. In the urban South, they found shelter, work, and other survival networks that enabled them to live in slaveholding territory, shielded and supported by their host communities in an act of collective resistance to slavery. While all fugitives risked their lives to escape slavery, those who fled to southern cities were perhaps the most vulnerable of all. Not dissimilar to modern-day refugees and illegal migr...