Originally Posted by
Wonnie
So.....if none of the quilts survived....and if no one wrote anything down....and they dismissed everything the blacks said as "just stories"... and the symbols on fences and trees were not meant to be permanent since the info changed sometimes frequently and have long since disappeared...where did these "professional" historians get their information....or is it.....afterall...just supposition.
The Underground Railroad itself is VERY well documented. There is a wealth of fascinating information available, beginning with the eye-witness account written by William Still, the "Father of the Underground Railroad" himself, of the 800 people he personally rescued and how the UGRR functioned. His account, based on the meticulous records he kept during the period when the UGRR functioned, was published after the Civil War.
William Still's account of how his Railroad worked is rich in detail, and includes exactly how the various helpers and rescuers communicated with one another, but there is no trace of 'quilt blocks' in it. Not one trace. Harriet Tubman writes in great detail about how the Railroad functioned, and doesn't mention quilt blocks either... nor do the hundreds of existing Oral History reports collected from in the 1920s and 1930s from the ex-slaves and runaways themselves.
The true history of slavery in the US, the struggle against it, the actual legislation which encouraged people in the North to help 'recapture' runaways, the very real bravery and dignity of the blacks is extraordinary and deserves all our respect. For me as a historian, it is a disservice to Black history to allow modern, pretty myths about quilt blocks to substitute for real facts and knowledge about the period.