Kalamazoo

Kalamazoo County served as a home of significant resistance to slavery in two communities, Schoolcraft and Kalamazoo. Well known activists, Pamela and Dr. Nathan Thomas who lived in Schoolcraft, claimed to help 1000-1500 African Americans who escaped from slavery. In the 1890's, both Pamela and Nathan reported, not only their own stories, but accounted for at least 30 men who assisted African Americans escaping slavery in communities such as Vandalia, Jackson, Battle Creek, Climax, Ann Arbor, Marshall and Detroit. In addition to those who aided African Americans, the Thomas' detailed the history and structure of this important network. In particular, Nathan mentions that Horace Hallock, a Presbyterian in Detroit, assisted African Americans and took advantage of the location of his back yard that ended at the Detroit River and provided a perfect location for escape across the Detroit River. He also remembers sending the second person he assisted to William M. Sullivan of Jackson who, four years earlier in 1839, began the American Freeman. Pamela Thomas vividly remembers that the first African American she and her husband helped in their new home together helped change her mind about the sanity of participating in the Underground Railroad. Pamela discusses how the "eloquent" words of an elderly woman who "made her way on foot alone from Missouri, at first helped by people of her own color, then by Friends (or Quakers)" prompted her to "do the little" she could.

Just north of Schoolcraft, activists in Kalamazoo had begun their first anti-slavery society in 1837. Eleven years later in 1848, 20 individuals and two Kalamazoo newspapers, the Telegraph and the Kalamazoo Gazette, subscribed to the Signal of Liberty, a national anti-slavery newspaper and voice for the Liberty Party. One subscriber, Henry Montague, remained active in the anti-slavery cause and worked with the women of Grand Prairie, an area of Kalamazoo. Montague submitted a letter to the Voice of the Fugitive on January 29, 1851 explaining to Henry Bibb, the editor of the paper, that women in the community formed the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Grand Prairie in 1847 and "devoted half a day every two weeks to knitting and sewing, while one of the number read such anti-slavery information as they had obtained." They then sent the goods to those who had escaped slavery and settled in Amherstburg, Ontario. Claiming that activity had slowed for a time, Montague tells Bibb that the women revived their interest in the anti-slavery movement after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Just a week before Montague wrote the letter, the women organized a donation party to increase their ability to assist those who escaped and to bring attention to the plight the escaped faced. An African American man who had escaped slavery spoke to the crowd and detailed the "wrongs of slavery, which he had experienced twenty-two years of his life." Countering the idea that all anti-slavery activists who assisted African Americans escaping slavery, kept their activities secret, Montague claims that the women's activities show "that the anti-slavery feeling is growing in our midst, that the fugitive will find a home and protection in this community though pains and penalties stare them in the face."

Sources
"Memories of a Conductor" by Pamela and Nathan Thomas written 1892. Voice of the Fugitive 1851-1852. Signal of Liberty Subscription List, Bentley Historical Library