Central Kansas Library System

A town at the center of the United States becomes the site of an ongoing struggle for freedom and equality. In May, 1854, Massachusetts was in an uproar. A judge, bound by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, had just ordered a young African American man who had escaped from slavery in Virginia and settled in Boston to be returned to bondage in the South. An estimated fifty thousand citizens rioted in protest. Observing the scene was Amos Adams Lawrence,...

Discusses the network of groups and individuals throughout Ohio and the New England states who aided slaves escaping from their captivity during the nineteenth century.

A biography of the African American civil rights worker who was born a slave and worked throughout his adult life to end slavery.