Abraham Galloway is the Black figure from the Civil War you should know aboutPosted in Articles, Audio, Biography, History, Media Archive, Slavery, United States, Videos on 2022-02-13 02:46Z by Steven |
Abraham Galloway is the Black figure from the Civil War you should know about
All Things Considered
National Public Radio
2022-02-08
Elizabeth Blair, Senior Producer/Reporter, Arts Desk
William Still’s ‘The Underground Railroad,’ 1872
He has been compared to James Bond and Malcolm X, though his name has largely been left out of the history books.
Abraham Galloway was an African American who escaped enslavement in North Carolina, became a Union spy during the Civil War and recruited Black soldiers to fight with the North. That’s the short version. The fuller picture would include his work as a revolutionary and being one of the first African Americans elected to the North Carolina Senate.
David Cecelski, author of The Fire of Freedom: Abraham Galloway and the Slaves’ Civil War, calls him a “swashbuckling figure who wouldn’t take sass from Northern or Southern or Black or white, Union or Confederate.”
When Cecelski was doing research for another book about maritime slavery, he kept coming across Galloway’s name. “And the stories were sort of so different than what I had been taught about slavery or the Civil War, or the role of African Americans in the Civil War,” he says…
Read or listen to the story (00:05:07) here.