Black History Month

A few words about Black History Month. My hometown has a rich but conflicted history as concerns the plight and flight of African people from the pre and post civil war era slavery and southern States persecution and oppression. Please check out some interesting oral history stories here http://www.lycoming.edu/underground
My ‘handle’ FreedomRoad is a reference to an actual Freedom Road which served as a link in the Underground Railroad. There are few reminders of that provenance today, nor is it easy to imagine the great risk Daniel Hughes, a ‘conductor’ in the Underground Railroad took in harboring fugitive slaves and surreptitiously leading them and evading slave bounty hunters. Hughes donated his land so that Black Union Civil War veterans might have a place for burial as no one else would have them, not even the U.S. Government whom they nobly served. A single historic sign marks the sacred ground today. My last personal visit was on a brisk bright fall day. No other person was around. There was just the sound of the wind blowing the leaves… and in my imagination, the haunting whispers of tired and frightened men and women hidden in the shadows of the hollow with only the hope for freedom and their faith in God sustaining them on their long arduous journey North. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Hughes_(underground_railroad)