While Uncle Tom's Cabin was an important anti-slavery document, it portrays a white man as the activist, a black man as passive & meek. But that's only one story, says Benjamin Quarles. No offense to Harriet Tubman fans, but scores of other blacks worked boldly to abolish slavery, many of them pioneers in the movement. By night, freeborn & former slaves alike moved runaways along the Underground Railroad & by day, delivered fervent speeches for their cause. Quarles explains: "The struggle to make man free was a grim business, but blacks were used to grim businesses."
"A fine, pioneering book...unsurpassed."--William S. McFeely, author of Frederick Douglass