At a Glance
This National Library Week, we invite you to join Dr. Lorraine McConaghy — author of "Free Boy: A True Story of Slave and Master," as she recounts the true story of Charles Mitchell who was born into slavery in Maryland and brought to Washington Territory by his owner in 1855. Five years later, when Mitchell was 12 years old, he was approached in the territorial capital, Olympia, by African-Canadian conspirators from Victoria. They encouraged him to sneak out of his master’s house at dawn on September 24, 1860, and run down to the landing, where the steamer Eliza Anderson was docked. There, the Black steward would hide the boy in the pantry, so that Mitchell could flee to freedom. In this lecture, we will explore the flight of this enslaved boy, one of only two slaves we know of in Washington Territory, and the only one to ride the maritime “underground railroad.”
