Students feel slaves' fearful flight

Albany-- Free School trip brings Underground Railroad journey and Harriet Tubman's freedom fight to life

By MIKE FRICANO, Staff writer
First published: Wednesday, May 15, 2002

Clang!

Hearing the heavy, cast-iron door slam to lock him in his jail cell, Victor Gonzalez' school lessons about the Underground Railroad didn't seem quite so boring.

Seeing the false cellars where the escaped slaves hid turned the words in textbooks into harsh realities for Gonzalez and his classmates at the Albany Free School.

"I wouldn't have made it,'' concluded seventh-grader Sarah Rogowski.

Students in the alternative private school's mixed seventh- and eighth-grade class recently returned from a 13-day trip through Maryland, Delaware and Pennsylvania where they retraced Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman's path to freedom. In Washington, D.C., the students met briefly with U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, urging her to support their efforts to get the federal government to pay Tubman's descendants her Civil War pension.

In addition to her work freeing slaves -- Tubman is credited with rescuing 300 on 19 stealth missions and winding up with a $40,000 bounty on her head -- Tubman served the Union Army as a scout, nurse and spy. She even led a Union raid that freed 800 slaves in South Carolina. The only payment she ever received from the government was her husband's war pension.

Eighth-grader Holley Newell said Tubman should have received $25 a month after the war for a total of $1,500. Chris Mercogliano, co-director of the Free School, and his students consulted with an accountant who told them that, with interest, the money would be worth about $1.5 million today.

"We don't think it's fair that she wasn't paid,'' Newell said.

Spurred on by the students' visit, Clinton will introduce legislation in the Senate, perhaps as early as today, asking for the money to be paid, according to spokeswoman Nina Blackwell. The legislation echoes a resolution introduced last year in the House of Representatives by Edolphus Towns, D-Brooklyn.

Pauline Copes Johnson, Tubman's great-grandniece and a tour guide at the Tubman museum in Auburn, said that she would use the money to pay for repairs at the family's church, Thompson Memorial A.M.E. Zion, where her "Aunt Harriet'' worshipped.

"They're repairing the roof because it leaks in there and the leaks have done quite a bit of damage to the sanctuary,'' said Copes Johnson, who was baptized in the church.

The money would also pay for installation of a wheelchair ramp outside, acquisition of more furniture and artifacts from the time period, and the opening of tunnels that were used to hide and transport fugitive slaves, Copes Johnson said.

Though the students had learned about slavery and the Underground Railroad in class and by visiting the Tubman museum in Auburn, they said that they couldn't truly imagine themselves in the same situations. But their experiences on the trip this spring established a more visceral connection.

While in Delaware, the students met with some Quakers who told stories of the slaves' hardship on their flight to freedom, including hiding in a narrow space of a false wall.

"Every time they told a story it got worse and worse for the slaves. It was really sad,'' Newell said.

To cover the cost of their trip, the students raised money and also received a $1,000 grant from the Southern Poverty Law Center, Mercogliano said. The students will publish a magazine about their experiences for the law center.

"I won't forget about this like I forget about everything else,'' Newell said. "This will burn in my brain forever.''