2012 National Underground Railroad Conference
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2012 National Underground Railroad Conference
Escaping to Destinations South: The Underground Railroad, Cultural Identity, and Freedom along the Southern Borderlands
Registration is NOW OPEN at the Conference Registration Page:
https://www.signup4.net/public/ap.aspx?EID=NPS210E&OID=147
Location: St. Augustine, Florida and surrounding areas
Date: June 20–23, 2012
National Park Service
National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Program
Southeast Region
Conference Theme and Description
The conference theme is the resistance to slavery through escape and flight to and from the South, including through international flight, from the 16th century to the end of the Civil War. Traditional views of the Underground Railroad focus on Northern destinations of freedom seekers, with symbols such as the North Star, Canada, and the Ohio River (the River Jordan) constructed as the primary beacons of freedom. This conception reduces the complexity of the Underground Railroad by ignoring the many freedom seekers that sought to obtain their freedom in southern destinations.
Likewise, borders and the movement across them by southern freedom seekers are also very crucial to our understanding of the complexities of the Underground Railroad. Freedom seekers often sought out political and geographical borderlands, as crossing these locations usually represented the divide between slavery and freedom. To this end, the conference will explore how southern freedom seekers seized opportunities to escape slavery into Spanish Florida and the Seminole Nation, to the Caribbean Islands, and into the western borderlands of Indian Territory, Texas, and Mexico.
Escape from enslavement was not just about physical freedom, but also about the search for cultural autonomy. The conference will explore the transformation and creation of new cultural identities among southern freedom seekers that occurred as a result of their journeys to freedom, such as the dispersal of Gullah Geechee culture and the formation of Black Seminole cultural identity. The conference seeks to create a cultural, historical, and interpretive exchange between domestic and international descendent communities of southern freedom seekers.
