NEW BOOK OUT: GATEWAY TO FREEDOM BY ERIC FONER (UNDERGROUND RAILROAD)

January 20, 2015 By TrackingB.com

**HEARING THIS IS OUT TO SELECT PRODUCERS TODAY AND TOMORROW**

GATEWAY TO FREEDOM: THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

Representation: Kevin Cleary (Pooka Entertainment)

Author: Eric Foner

The dramatic story of fugitive slaves and the anti-slavery activists who defied the law to help them reach freedom. Building on fresh evidence—including a detailed record of slave escapes secretly kept by newspaper publisher Sydney Howard Gay, one of the key organizers in New York— Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Foner elevates the Underground Railroad from folklore to living history. To protect fugitives and fight kidnappings, the city's free blacks worked with white abolitionists, like Gay, to organize the New York Vigilance Committee in 1835. The committee began to bring fugitive slaves from the South, through Philadelphia and New York, to Albany, Syracuse, and Canada. This network of antislavery resistance, centered on New York City, became known as the Underground Railroad. Forced to operate in secrecy by hostile laws, courts, and politicians, the city’s underground-railroad agents helped more than 3,000 fugitive slaves reach freedom between 1830 and 1860.

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