Sept. 13, 1858: Oberlin Wellington Rescue

Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. Rethinking Schools. 16 pages.
In this lesson, students explore many of the real challenges faced by abolitionists with a focus on the American Anti-Slavery Society.

Teaching Activity. By Adam Sanchez.
Through a mixer activity, students encounter how enslaved people resisted the brutal exploitation of slavery. The lesson culminates in a collective class poem highlighting the defiance of the enslaved.

Teaching Guide. Edited by Adam Sanchez. 2019. Rethinking Schools. 181 pages.
Students will discover the real abolition story, one about some of the most significant grassroots social movements in U.S. history.

Profiles. Zinn Education Project. 2014.
Brief biographies of 25 Black abolitionists.

Book — Non-fiction. By Clint Smith. 2021. 336 pages.
An examination of how monuments and landmarks represent — and misrepresent — the central role of slavery in U.S. history and its legacy today.

Book — Fiction. By Christopher Paul Curtis. 2018. 256 pages.
A novel for young adults that that shows how slavery was state-sanctioned terrorism and the impact of the Fugitive Slave Law.

Picture book. By Dennis Brindell Fradin and Judith Bloom Fradin. Illustrated by Eric Velasquez. 2013.
Story of John Price’s escape to freedom with the help of the Oberlin–Wellington Rescue.

A Boston judge stopped the extradition of George Latimer, who had escaped enslavement in Virginia, and allowed him to raise funds for his own manumission.

Seventy-seven enslaved people attempted to flee Washington, D.C. by sailing away on a schooner called The Pearl.

The U.S. Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

U.S. Marshals arrested Shadrach Minkins, who had escaped from slavery in Norfolk, Virginia.

Abolitionists freed a man captured under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 in Syracuse, New York.

The Supreme Court declared in horrific Dred Scott v. Sandford ruling that “Any person descended from Africans, whether slave or free, is not a citizen of U.S.”

Harriet Tubman helped rescue Charles Nalle, a fugitive from slavery in Virginia, in Troy, New York.