Abolitionists Then and Now

[illinoisprogressive]

What a really good op ed on Poverty and the Abolitionist L. Grimes and Candidate B. Obama. Very well written and quite thoughtful.
I really enjoyed the background and bit of bio of Grimes.



Washington, D.C., is one of those places where the sweep of centuries can be compressed into a single day. Wednesday provided an example. Two events came together with a commonality easily overlooked in a city eternally restless for breaking news: the commemoration downtown of D.C. abolitionist Leonard A. Grimes and the unveiling of Sen. Barack Obama's urban policy agenda across town in Southeast.

It began for me at the corner of 22nd and H streets NW, on the campus of George Washington University. About 50 scholars and guests, led by GWU President Stephen Trachtenberg and Ambassador Ronald Palmer, a GWU professor emeritus, gathered to dedicate a plaque commemorating Grimes, a black man born free in Virginia who became an antislavery activist and an organizer of the Underground Railroad

The house where Grimes lived between 1836 and 1846 was on the corner where the plaque is now embedded in the ground. His home, however, was more than a dwelling place.

Washington in the 1830s housed slave pens, slave traders, slave auctions and slave masters. In an act of defiance, Grimes allowed his Foggy Bottom home to be used as a safe house for escaped slaves from Virginia. Their first stop on the way north to freedom was Washington, according to Underground Railroad historian Hilary Russell.

Grimes's coach business was cover for his Underground Railroad work. He transported many slaves to freedom, but not without a heavy cost. After helping a slave and her six children escape from Loudoun County, Grimes was arrested in Washington and sentenced to hard labor in a Richmond prison from 1840 to 1842. The jailing, however, didn't dampen his antislavery spirit. In 1846, Grimes and his family moved to New Bedford, Mass., where he continued his work as an abolitionist and minister. He settled in Boston in 1848 and started a church that became a haven for fugitive slaves.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/20/AR2007072001801.html?hpid=opinionsbox1