When we think about the history of slavery in the United States we often think of the Underground Railroad and attempts made by Abolitionists and others to help slaves escape from the South to the free states of the North and Canada. What we don’t realize is that despite the near mythic role popular history has ascribed to it, the Underground Railroad was in its heyday (1850-1860) the route to freedom for fewer than 30,000 slaves by most estimates – out of a slave population of 4.5 million.
There are many places throughout the Northeast and parts of the Midwest where the Underground Railroad’s stations and safe houses can still be seen.
The Bialystoker Synagogue
The Bialystoker Synagogue on New York’s Lower East Side
The Bialystoker Synagogue located in New York City, it was built as the Willett Street Methodist Episcopal Church in 1826. The building contains one of the railroad’s rest stops in a small attic above its balcony.
The Erastus Farnham House, Fremont, IN: Located just south of Indiana’s border with Michigan, this was an Underground Railroad stop. Indiana was a slave state, but Michigan was not.
Painting of runaway slaves who lived in the Great Dismal Swamp
Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, VA and NC: Runaway slaves did not only find refuge in brick and mortar safe houses, many hid in the swamp to escape detection until they could safely make their way to freedom. One of Harriet Tubman’s novels, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, is about the Maroon’s who lived here.
John Hossack House
The John Hossack House
John Hossack House, Ottawa, IL: Abolitionist John Hossack sheltered fugitive slaves in this house. In 1860 he was convicted in Federal Court of violating the Fugitive Slave Law.
The 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference still has more than a day to go — but it’s off to a tremendously weird start.
While the conference has featured plenty of valuable speeches and events for right-wing activists, it has also been filled with the type of odd moments and outbursts that have come to characterize right-wing gatherings.
Here are five of the lowlights:
Sean Hannity’s Creepy Joke
Fox News host Sean Hannity pumped up the crowd with his Friday morning speech about how liberals are stupid — his words, not mine — but one of the jokes that he told to the “young, good-looking crowd” fell completely flat.
“I can look out in the crowd, I kinda have Fox X-ray vision, and I can see that some of you women, you don’t even know it yet, but you’re pregnant,” Hannity said. “It’s not your fault. It’s not his fault.”
It was weird — and foreshadowed some even weirder sex talk later in the day.
Scott Walker’s ISIS Plan
During his speech on Thursday, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker explained how he would defeat ISIS: By crushing them like they’re kindergarten teachers.
“I want a commander-in-chief who will do everything in their power to ensure that the threats from radical Islamic terrorists do not wash up on American soil,” Walker explained. “We need a leader with that kind of confidence. If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world.”
Surprisingly, this was not the first time that Walker compared peaceful protesters to ultraviolent terrorists.
Meanwhile, in the convention hall, Walker’s tough talk had the crowd chanting, “Run, Scott, run!”
Donald Trump’s Birther Obsession
Reality TV star Donald Trump is still pretending that he may run for president — but his CPAC speech provided a handy reminder of how well that would go for him.
Trump’s address was well designed for an audience that has always mistrusted President Obama’s soaring rhetoric (“Common Core is bad. Bad! Second Amendment is good!” Trump declared at one point), but as usual, the Donald couldn’t resist a good birther crack.
That’s right: According to Trump, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Donald Trump are all birthers. Trump is just better at it.
Rick Santorum’s Awful Joke
Trump wasn’t the only CPAC speaker to try out a birther line. Former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum tried to bring up the conspiracy with a touch of humor.
“In fact the president’s popularity is so bad around the world today that I heard this report from a source that the Kenyan government is actually developing proof that Barack Obama was actually born in America,” Santorum said.
About three people laughed.
Phil Robertson’s Strange Speech
No CPAC speech so far has been stranger than the stem-winder uncorked by Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson, who was awarded the conference’s “Andrew Breitbart Defender of the First Amendment Award.”
Robertson’s half-hour speech began as a sermon in defense of religious liberty — and then skipped the rails when he began ranting about sexually transmitted diseases.
“110 million Americans now have a sexually transmitted illness,” Robertson warned. “I don’t want you, America, to get sick. I don’t want you to become ill. I don’t want you to come down with a debilitating disease! I don’t want you to die early! You’re disease-free and she’s disease-free, you marry, you keep your sex right there. You won’t get sick from a sexually transmitted disease.”
Predictably, Robertson thinks that America’s STD problem is liberals’ fault.
“It’s the revenge of the hippies!” he raged. “Sex, drugs, and rock and roll have come back to haunt us.”
Robertson’s speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention should be a blast.
Welcome to “This Week In Crazy,” The National Memo’s weekly update on the wildest attacks, conspiracy theories, and other loony behavior from the increasingly unhinged right wing. Starting with number five:
5. Ralph Peters
Only 9 percent of Republicans believe that Barack Obama is a Christian, but that doesn’t stop the far right from describing the president in Biblical terms.
The latest Republican to dip into the New Testament for an anti-Obama attack is Fox News strategic analyst and Vladimir Putin fanboy Ralph Peters. Appearing on America’s Newsroom Wednesday, Peters broke down President Obama’s efforts to fight ISIS. You could say that he disapproves.
“Christian women are kidnapped and raped and raped again, our president does nothing! Christians are driven from their homes in the Middle East by the hundreds of thousands, slaughtered by the tens of thousands, and our president does nothing!” Peters raged. “He is the reincarnation of Pontius Pilate washing his hands, but this blood’s not coming off.”
But on the plus side, the next season of The History Channel’s The Bible promises to be just as controversial as the first.
4. Barry Loudermilk
Weeks after an unfortunate case of vaccine trutherism struck the Republican Party, certain politicians are still having trouble getting the junk science out of their systems.
The latest official to stick his foot in his mouth on the subject is freshman U.S. Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA). Asked about the entirely fictional link between vaccines and autism at a town hall meeting, Loudermilk cited his own personal experience.
“I believe it’s the parents’ decision whether to immunize or not. And so I’m looking at [my] wife – most of our children, we didn’t immunize. They’re healthy,” he explained. “Of course, home schooling, we didn’t have to get the mandatory immunization.”
The fun didn’t stop there. At the same meeting, Loudermilk told a different constituent that we should not line the southern border with improvised explosive devices, “because there’s a lot of Americans who work [there] and kids around the border as well.” (The morality of blowing non-citizens to smithereens was not discussed.)
The race to be Senator Rand Paul’s (R-KY) running mate is already underway, and Rep. Loudermilk is lapping the field.
3. Michele Fiore
Pictured: Not a tumor (Phil Parsons/Flickr)
Nevada assemblywoman Michele Fiore (R), who was last seen trying to arm the “hot little girls on campus” with guns, checks in at number three for a bit of medical misinformation that makes Rep. Loudermilk look like Jonas Salk.
On her radio show last weekend, Fiore explained how her new “terminally ill bill” could revolutionize the health care system.
“If you have cancer, which I believe is a fungus, and we can put a pic line into your body, and we’re flushing — let’s say salt-water, sodium cardonate [sic] — through that line, and flushing out the fungus,” she said, as reported by Jon Ralston. “These are some procedures that are not FDA approved in America that are very inexpensive, cost-effective.”
In case this was not already clear, cancer is not a fungus, and it cannot be cured with sodium bicarbonate (the compound that Fiore was presumably trying to name, and better known as baking soda).
And in case this was also not clear: Do not get your treatment from Fiore’s home health care company.
2. Vito Barbieri
Add Idaho Rep. Vito Barbieri (R) to the list of politicians who struggled with basic biology this week.
The Idaho legislature is currently considering a bill that would ban doctors from prescribing abortion-inducing medication via a video chat. During a Monday hearing, Barbieri resolved to leave no stone unturned.
Dr. Julie Madsen, a physician who said she has provided various telemedicine services in Idaho, was testifying in opposition to the bill. She said some colonoscopy patients may swallow a small device to give doctors a closer look at parts of their colon.
“Can this same procedure then be done in a pregnancy? Swallowing a camera and helping the doctor determine what the situation is?” Barbieri asked.
Madsen replied that would be impossible because swallowed pills do not end up in the vagina.
“Fascinating. That makes sense,” Barbieri said, amid the crowd’s laughter.
The bill passed the House State Affairs Committee 13-4 — Barbieri voted in favor of it — meaning that a new barrier will soon be erected to women’s health in Idaho. But at least Barbieri — who sits on the board of a right-wing “crisis pregnancy center” — got a valuable lesson in basic anatomy. 1. Ron Paul
Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr
None of this week’s fake physicians could top this week’s “winner,” Dr. Ron Paul.
In audio uncovered by BuzzFeed News this week, the former congressman and presidential candidate discussed the anti-war contingent in Congress with longtime associate Lew Rockwell.
“I was always annoyed with it in Congress because we had an anti-war unofficial group, a few libertarian Republicans and generally the Black Caucus and others did not — they are really against war because they want all of that money to go to food stamps for people here,” Paul explained.
Rockwell, of course, is amenable to Paul’s “peace for food stamps” theory; he was intimately involved with Paul’s infamous newsletters, which suggested renaming New York City “Welfaria,” among other racist attacks.
There is good news for Paul, though. If he’s really that offended by the Congressional Black Caucus’ attempt to fund food security for the nation’s poor, he could always join the apparently thriving secession movement (a phenomenon that Paul believes is already taking place, and is “good news”).
Meanwhile, George W. Bush can breathe a sigh of relief; there’s no chance that he’ll be the most embarrassing family member of a presidential candidate in 2016.
Check out previous editions of This Week In Crazy here. Think we missed something? Let us know in the comments!
White Earth, directed by J. Christian Jensen (via WhiteEarthMovie.com)
The five short documentaries nominated for the Academy Award — ranging from roughly 20 to 40 minutes in length — represent an international cross-section of filmmakers pointing their cameras on the otherwise ignored or unexamined. In a short-form documentary, you cannot diagnose a social ill, attempt to topple a dictator, or crack open the kind of sociopolitical can of worms that a feature-length doc, like fellow nominee Citizenfour, can examine. What the format is well suited to is capturing minutiae, and building itself out of quiet observations instead of sweeping declarations. Each of the five films focuses on the domestic, mundane, workaday elements of life that don’t register on a bigger canvas.
White Earth (dir. J. Christian Jensen), a portrait of a small North Dakota town impacted by an oil boom, is the least successful at connecting with its human subjects, but the most successful at conjuring visual poetry from its material. Any environmental, social, or cultural ramifications of the oil boom lie outside the film’s scope of interest, but if White Earth is sparse on humanity, it is generous with its imagery: plumes of fire flaring into the fog, oil wells glowing auburn in the sunset, impossibly long trains of jet-black tanker cars snaking through the whiteout of prairies in winter. In any final analysis, it cannot be denied that the film is astonishingly beautiful.
Whether by coincidence or not, the unifying theme among the four remaining films is the proximity of death: Death on a daily scale, death as a domestic or occupational reality, death as a future fact, present fear, and everyday concern. Each film is attuned to the rhythms of routine, the binds of loyalty and family — specifically, the sacrifices parents make for their children — and the different ways people find grace, courage, and comfort in the face of the inevitable.
Is it gauche to assign aesthetic points and demerits to these true stories of life and death — stories that began long before the cameras rolled, and continue to unfold in the subjects’ blogs, ongoing work, or, at minimum, their enduring existence? Possibly. But whatever their faults, each of these films accomplishes what documentaries at their best can do: They shine a light and expand our world.
The Reaper (La Parka), directed by Gabriel Serra Arguello (via YouTube)
“I think everyone can kill. You just need experience.” So says Efrain, the subject, namesake, and haunted soul at the center of The Reaper (La Parka)(dir. Gabriel Serra Arguello), and he would know. Efrain has worked at an abattoir six days a week for 25 years; each day he shoots a bolt into the brains of 500 steer. The film is a quiet, almost meditative examination of industrial slaughter and its effect on the people who keep it going. The camera idly observes well-worn machinery of death chugging along: conveyors caked in carrion, ducts dripping with offal, the ubiquity of blood, flies buzzing everywhere. Barely more expressive than the scenery is Efrain, numb and solemn, reflecting in voiceovers on the nature of death. When he watches his children eat chicken, it’s hard not to see what Efrain sees.
Joanna, directed by Aneta Kopacz (via YouTube)
A mother, Joanna (dir. Aneta Kopacz), is writing something of a manifesto for her son. Well, not for him exactly — for the older boy, the young man, she knows he will become. She is trying to anticipate and answer questions that he doesn’t know how to ask yet. Though prone to the whims and explosions in temper that come with boyhood, he is an unusually mature child: curious, insightful, and more adroit at speaking to adults than they might be comfortable with. Not Joanna. She is struggling with a terminal illness. Her conversations with her son and their attendant moments — a picnic, a drive, a walk in the woods, foraging for mushrooms and splashing in the mud — are limited, and she understands how precious they are. He seems to as well. Joanna builds itself slowly, disarmingly, from such moments.
When do “subjects” become “characters”? When does a record of events become a story? This one ends too soon.
Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1, directed by Ellen Goosenberg Kent and Dana Perry (via HBO)
In the last 14 years, more American veterans have died from suicide than were killed in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs established the Veterans Crisis Line as a resource for soldiers returning to civilian life, often struggling with post traumatic stress disorder, addiction, and depression. The hotline fields 22,000 calls each month, and is the only one of its kind. Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1(dir. Ellen Goosenberg Kent and Dana Perry) is a sobering, anxious study of the men and women who answer calls 24 hours a day from veterans, often at moments of severe crisis. Pills, guns, and knives are present, and sometimes the counselors need to summon emergency intervention. These dialogues (of which we hear only the responders’ sides) are intimate and harrowing, as the counselors negotiate the veterans away from imminent self-harm with seemingly unlimited calm, patience, and compassion.
Crisis Hotline, which comes off the HBO Documentary Films production line, is a sleek piece of work, perhaps to its own disservice. Cameras swoop in and out of the counselors’ offices, chasing them down halls; jittery zoom-ins punch moments of extreme tension. One sequence, in which the counselors track down the name and location of a soldier who has left a short and cryptic message, is scored and pieced together like an episode of 24. Predictably, the most powerful moments of the film eschew these kind of You-Are-There-And-This-Is-Happening-Now! stylistic fireworks, and focus on the counselors talking softly, listening intently, absorbing unimaginable pain, and putting their headphones back on to take another call.
Our Curse (Nasza Klatwa), directed by Tomasz Śliwiński and Maciej Ślesicki (via YouTube)
Our Curse (Nasza Klatwa) (dir. Tomasz Śliwiński and Maciej Ślesicki) begins with Tomasz and Magda Śliwiński filming themselves sitting on a couch, exhausted nearly into silence, shortly before they are to take their newborn son, Leo, home from the hospital. Leo has been diagnosed with congenital central hypoventilation syndrome (CCHS), or “Ondine’s Curse,” a rare, incurable disorder which prevents him from breathing normally while asleep. They struggle with a dual unreality — first of being young parents, and second, that their son’s prognosis is a lifetime sentence. Tomasz openly fears that when Leo is old enough to understand his condition, he will commit suicide, rather than face a lifelong struggle of relying on machines to survive. How do you explain to your son that every night he could die? How can anyone — let alone a child — cope with that knowledge?
Our Curse unfolds in Leo’s first year of life as Tomasz and Magda adapt to their new realities: the persistent thump of a ventilator’s mechanical wheeze, the restless alertness to Leo’s rhythms of sleep, the unending tangle of equipment, doctor’s appointments, and insurance wrangling. In one long, unbroken static shot, we see Leo’s parents wrap him up to prevent his limbs from flailing so they can remove, clean, and reinsert his tracheal tube — while Leo screams in near-complete silence. For the most part, Tomasz, a student at Warsaw Film School at the time of filming and co-director of the film, forgoes the temptation of turning maudlin (except for an ill-advised last-minute montage), and opts instead for understated shots of everyday childcare complicated by the elaborate mechanical apparatuses preserving Leo’s life. These he nimbly edits together with video diaries of the parents expressing their worries, flashes of mordant humor, and finally a birthday party that feels more than usually like a triumph.
As with all of these docs, the story doesn’t end when the film stops. But if the blog is any indication, Leo is doing quite well.
