Description: The spectacular 1848 escape of William and Ellen Craft (1824-1900; 1826-1891) from slavery in Macon, Georgia, is a dramatic story in the annals of American history. Barbara McCaskill revisits this dual escape and examines the collaborations and partnerships that characterized the Crafts' activism for the next thirty years.
Brief description: BARBARA McCASKILL is a professor of English at the University of Georgia, coorganizer of the Genius of Phillis Wheatley Peters Project, and associate academic director of the Willson Center for Humanities & Arts. She is the coeditor of Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem: African American Literature and Culture, 1877-1919 and author of Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery: William and Ellen Craft in Cultural Memory (Georgia). McCaskill edited and wrote an introduction to the 1860 memoir Running A Thousand Miles for Freedom: The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (also Georgia).
Review Quotes: Barbara McCaskill's new book should be read by everyone interested in the spectacular story of the self-emancipating Crafts - one of antebellum America's most compelling stories of bondage and of memory. McCaskill brilliantly builds on her editions of the Crafts' Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom with new details gleaned from meticulous research. Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery illuminates McCaskill's exemplary archival excavations into the lives of Ellen, William, their community of renowned formerly enslaved authors and activists, the whites who obstructed their life's journeys and those who helped clear their paths, and ultimately, the Crafts' outstanding progeny.--Joycelyn Moody, Sue E. Denman Distinguished Chair in American Literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio