![]() “They did need people to help but abolitionists were white, Black, Native American they weren’t just white. They were the genesis of their own movement. They weren’t helpless people sitting on a plantation waiting for the white abolitionists to come and get them. You have to realise the risks that freedom seekers had to take, how they escaped, why they escaped, the dangers or problems they encountered on their flight to freedom. Jones says: “In many of the accounts that you read, the abolitionists seem to be the heroes and, not to take anything away from their heroic actions, but what the freedom seekers did is downplayed. On the far left, abolitionist leader, Harriet Tubman and others. Black people with access to education and resources, such as Robert Purvis and William Whipper of Philadelphia, offered political influence and legal assistance. Historical tellings of the underground railroad have also tended to emphasise “white saviours”, such as Quakers, while underplaying the role of African Americans who provided shelter, clothing, food and money. Tracks and trains are not the only common misconception. It was cryptic language to be able to assist people to do what they needed to do.” So people could freely talk about it and people hearing the conversation may have simply thought they were talking about a railroad line or a railroad station, which it wasn’t. A conductor simply would have been someone who would take freedom seekers from one place to the other. “For example, a depot was not a train station at all it could have been a graveyard, a river, a barn, a place in the woods. Jones explained: “About the time when the underground railroad started, trains had started to crisscross the country, specifically the Baltimore-Ohio line, so abolitionists and freedom seekers found that they could freely talk about movement simply by referring to things in terms of railroad vocabulary. How, then, did this rail metaphor come about? It was all to do with time, place and speaking in code. I don’t want CGI.’ And so we found a private rail network and we built our tunnels above them.” I want real tracks, real trains, real tunnels. The 10-part series’ director, Barry Jenkins, whose credits include the Oscar-winning film Moonlight, recalled at a virtual press conference: “I told Mark Friedberg, our production designer: ‘This can’t be fake. But along with cotton fields, plantations and woods, it is equally persuasive in its depiction of underground steam trains that offer light at the end of the tunnel. The gap between the literal and the metaphorical was explored by The Underground Railroad, a Pulitzer Prize-winning 2016 novel by Colson Whitehead, which reimagined actual trains thundering beneath the soil.Ī big-budget-small-screen adaptation, which is now available on Amazon Prime, delivers a combination of ravishing cinematography and elemental suffering (there was a therapist on set) reminiscent of Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave. “The underground railroad was just a metaphor for a movement of people to be able to organise a network of abolitionists and freedom seekers.” “When people hear ‘railroad’, they automatically think it was a train,” Jones adds. It was, in fact, a network of secret routes and safe houses used by thousands of enslaved people to flee from the south to free states and Canada in the early to mid-19th century. ![]() Jones notes that the first thing people tend to get wrong about the underground railroad is assuming that a series of subterranean trains, tunnels and platforms branched out like the London Underground or New York subway.
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