David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City (repost)
David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City By Graham Russell Gao Hodges
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press 2010 | 264 Pages | ISBN: 0807833266 | PDF | 7 MB
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press 2010 | 264 Pages | ISBN: 0807833266 | PDF | 7 MB
David Ruggles (1810-1849) was of one of the most heroic–and has been one of the most often overlooked–figures of the early abolitionist movement in America. Graham Russell Gao Hodges provides the first biography of this African American activist, writer, publisher, and hydrotherapist who secured liberty for more than six hundred former bond people, the most famous of whom was Frederick Douglass. A forceful, courageous voice for black freedom, Ruggles mentored Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and William Cooper Nell in the skills of antislavery activism. As a founder of the New York Committee of Vigilance, he advocated a "practical abolitionism" that included civil disobedience and self-defense in order to preserve the rights of self-emancipated enslaved people and to protect free blacks from kidnappers who would sell them into slavery in the South.