Profs & Pints DC: The Reverse Underground Railroad

Profs and Pints DC presents: “The Reverse Underground Railroad,” with Richard Bell, professor of history at the University of Maryland and author of Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home.

What if the Underground Railroad had an evil counterpart that ran in the opposite direction and transported people from freedom to captivity? What if there was a black-market network of human traffickers and slave traders who made their livings by stealing away thousands of free African Americans from the northern states in order to sell them into slavery in the Deep South?

Believe it or not such a thing existed.

The most famous unwilling rider on this Reverse Underground Railroad was Solomon Northup, the author of Twelve Years a Slave and the subject of the Oscar-winning 2013 movie. But Northup was far from the only prisoner-passenger.

Over the first six decades of the nineteenth century,…