Gregg during a series of interviews in the 1880s, but the manuscript sat forgotten in Duke University’s archives until historian Stuart Seeley Sprague unearthed it and published it in 1996. Parker recounted these rescues to journalist Frank M. The enslaver awoke and tore after him, firing his pistol, but Parker and the family managed to escape across the river.
Parker snuck into the room, carefully plucked the child from the bed-where the enslaver also lay sleeping-and dashed back through the house. Once, an enslaver suspected a married couple would attempt to escape, so he took their baby and put him to sleep in his room. Parker’s rescue missions were especially dangerous, partially because bounty hunters looking for fugitives knew who he was, and partially because Parker himself was dauntless. Through it all, Parker made regular excursions across the Ohio River to spirit fugitives from Kentucky back to Ripley’s safe houses (one belonged to John Rankin, a prominent white abolitionist who lived less than a mile from Parker). The plan worked, and Parker left for Ripley, Ohio, where he built a house, started a family, and patented a few popular mechanical parts for tobacco machines during a successful career as a foundryman. At age 18, he persuaded one of the doctor’s patients to purchase him and let him gradually buy back his freedom with his foundry earnings. There, Parker apprenticed at an iron foundry-and learned to read and write, with the help of the doctor’s children. Parker was 8 years old, a merchant separated him from his enslaved mother in Norfolk, Virginia, and sold him to a doctor in Mobile, Alabama. Nyttend, Wikimedia Commons // Public Domain “Like other races, this newly emancipated people will need all the knowledge of their past condition which they can get.” 2. “The race must not forget the rock from whence they were hewn, nor the pit from whence they were digged,” he wrote in the introduction. He hoped that the “extraordinary determination and endeavor” exhibited in the harrowing narratives would inspire Black Americans to continue the struggle for civil rights. But there’s another reason he’s often referred to as “the Father of the Underground Railroad.” Still documented the stories of more than 600 escapees and published them all in a groundbreaking volume called The Underground Railroad in 1872, making him the only Black person ever to write and self-publish a firsthand account of activity on the Underground Railroad.
It’s estimated that Still ferried about 800 people to freedom during his tenure one of them was his brother Peter. In that position, Still oversaw the region’s network of safe houses- his own house among them-and raised money to finance key rescue missions, including a few of Harriet Tubman’s. He taught himself to read and write, got a job as a clerk for the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, and advanced through the organization until he was named chairman of its new Vigilance Committee in the early 1850s. Macmillan, Wikimedia Commons // Public Domainīorn to formerly enslaved parents in New Jersey in 1821, William Still moved to Philadelphia at age 23 and took up the abolitionist mantle in more ways than one. A sketch of William Still from Wilbur Henry Siebert and Albert Bushnell Hart's 1898 book The Underground Railroad From Slavery to Freedom.
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