Lecture: Reverse Underground Railroad: Slavery & Kidnapping in Pre-Civil War America

Dr. Richard Bell, author of Stolen, shines a light on the Reverse Underground Railroad, a black market network of human traffickers and slave traders who stole thousands of legally free African Americans to fuel slavery’s expansion in the decades before the Civil War. In his book, Bell, a professor of history at the University of Maryland, tells the story of five boys who were kidnapped into slavery in 1825 Philadelphia and their astonishing odyssey home. Stolen was a finalist for the George Washington Prize and the Harriet Tubman Prize.