At one point he was interviewing what appeared to be a half-crazed roadie and the unchecked speaker blurted out obvious blasphemy. TM stared briefly and quickly walked away.
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Michael and Kevin seemed more natural Overall, I thought the film was fun, but contained some amateurish elements. In spite of this, I learned more about the history of a fascinating trio of young men. The best option is to view the DVD: Interesting behind the scenes notes are given and the side-stories were very entertaining.
I give it 3 out of 5 possible Wiels for fans of doco, music or DC Talk, for those non-fans, skip this entirely. Start your free trial. Find showtimes, watch trailers, browse photos, track your Watchlist and rate your favorite movies and TV shows on your phone or tablet! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Full Cast and Crew. IMDb's Guide to Streaming. Share this Rating Title: Free at Last Video 8. Use the HTML below.
You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. Hayes, the future president, who as a young lawyer in the s defended fugitive slaves; William Seward, the future governor of New York and secretary of state, who provided financial support to Harriet Tubman and other underground activists; and Allan Pinkerton, founder of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, who in helped John Brown lead a band of fugitive slaves out of Chicago and on to Detroit, bound for Canada. By the s, the underground ranged from the northern borders of states including Maryland, Virginia and Kentucky to Canada and numbered thousands among its ranks from Delaware to Kansas.
But its center was the Ohio River Valley, where scores of river crossings served as gateways from slave states to free and where, once across the Ohio, fugitives could hope to be passed from farm to farm all the way to the Great Lakes in a matter of days. In practice, the underground functioned with a minimum of central direction and a maximum of grass-roots involvement, particularly among family members and church congregations.
On occasion, fugitives might be transported in hearses or false-bottomed wagons, men might be disguised as women, women as men, blacks powdered white with talc. The volume of underground traffic varied widely.
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Levi Coffin estimated that during his lifetime he assisted 3, fugitives— some or so annually—while others, who lived along more lightly traveled routes, took in perhaps two or three a month, or only a handful over several years. One of the most active underground centers—and the subject of a minute docudrama, Brothers of the Borderland , produced for the Freedom Center and introduced by Oprah Winfrey—was Ripley, Ohio, about 50 miles east of Cincinnati.
Today, Ripley is a sleepy village of two- and three-story 19thcentury houses nestled at the foot of low bluffs, facing south toward the Ohio River and the cornfields of Kentucky beyond.
But in the decades preceding the Civil War, it was one of the busiest ports between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, its economy fueled by river traffic, shipbuilding and pork butchering. Since the s, a network of radical white Presbyterians, led by the Rev. John Rankin, a flinty Tennessean who had moved north to escape the atmosphere of slavery, collaborated with local blacks on both sides of the river in one of the most successful underground operations.
It was visible for miles along the river and well into Kentucky. Recently, local preservationist Betty Campbell led the way into the austere parlor of the Rankin house, now a museum open to the public. She pointed out the fireplace where hundreds of runaways warmed themselves on winter nights, as well as the upstairs crawl space where, on occasion, they hid.
Because the Rankins lived so close to the river and within easy reach of slave hunters, they generally sheltered fugitives only briefly before leading them on horseback along an overgrown streambed through a forest to a neighboring farmhouse a few miles north. Frequently, trusted slaves were sent from Kentucky to the market at Ripley. For families like the Rankins, the clandestine work became a full-time vocation.
One Rankin collaborator, Methodist minister John B. Mahan, was arrested at his home and taken back to Kentucky, where after 16 months in jail he was made to pay a ruinous fine that impoverished his family and likely contributed to his early death. They were repulsed only after a gun battle that left one of the attackers dead. One Ripley man who did so repeatedly was John P. Parker, a former slave who had bought his freedom in Mobile, Alabama; by day, he operated an iron foundry.
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By night, he ferried slaves from Kentucky plantations across the river to Ohio. Although no photograph of Parker has survived, his saga has been preserved in a series of interviews recorded in the s and published in as His Promised Land: The Autobiography of John P.
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On one occasion, Parker learned that a party of fugitives, stranded after the capture of their leader, was hiding about 20 miles south of the river. Armed with a pair of pistols and a knife, and guided by another slave, Parker reached the runaways at about dawn. With slave hunters closing in, one of the fugitives insisted on setting off in search of water. He had gone only a short way before he came hurtling through the brush, pursued by two white men. Parker turned to the slaves still in hiding. The group proceeded to the river, where a patroller spotted them. Bloodhounds baying in their ears, the runaways located a rowboat quickly enough, but it had room for only eight people.
Two would have to be left behind. As Parker rowed toward Ohio and freedom, he saw slave hunters converge on the spot where the two men had been left behind. More than once, his house was searched and he was assaulted in the streets of Ripley. Yet he estimated that he managed to help some fugitives to freedom.
On a clear day last spring, Carl Westmoreland returned to the Evers farm. Since his first visit, he had learned that the slave jail had been built in the s by a prosperous slave trader, John Anderson, who used it to hold slaves en route by flatboat to the huge slave market at Natchez, Mississippi, where auctions were held several times a year. But that building has already begun to teach, by causing people to go back and look at the local historical record. He was chasing a runaway slave. Subscribe or Give a Gift.
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