Historian Relives Underground Railroad

You could call Anthony Cohen the Underground Houdini.

Like another famous escape artist, he locked himself in a box to perform his amazing feat.

But Cohen’s model wasn’t Harry Houdini. It was Henry “Box” Brown, who fled from slavery in 1848 by having himself shipped in a crate from Richmond, Va., to Philadelphia.

Cohen, an expert on the Underground Railroad, was so impressed by Brown’s escape that he copied the technique during one segment of an 800-mile trek along one of the many routes taken by escaping slaves.

“I thought, well, how can I actually walk the Underground Railroad without attempting to see if I can get in the footsteps of the fugitives and get a sense of what they went through and what they felt like,” the historian said in a February speech at Mount St. Mary’s College in Emmitsburg.

Cohen is writing about his journey, including his sweltering seven hours curled inside the wooden crate, for a book due from Hyperion as early as this fall. His research signals a growing, and very public, interest in the Underground Railroad, a movement that survived on secrecy.

A bill now pending in Congress proposes a program within the National Park Service to identify and commemorate the movement’s clandestine activities. Vernon Jordan and Rosa Parks are among fund-raisers targeting $100 million for a “freedom center” in Cincinnati, a favorite destination for some of the tens of thousands who escaped bondage.

“It’s a significant chapter in American history, perhaps the first civil rights movement in this country. It deserves to be remembered, and it’s vanishing,” said Edwin Rigaud, executive director of the national museum planned for Cincinnati.

Perhaps no researcher has done more than Cohen, 34, of Silver Spring, Md., to relive the experiences of runaway slaves. For six weeks in 1996, he journeyed from Maryland to communities founded by escapees in Ontario, Canada. Traveling more than 400 miles on foot, he stayed overnight in the same Quaker sanctuaries that sheltered fleeing slaves.

The centerpiece of his trip was the box--30 inches high, 28 inches wide, 24 inches long--a chamber of horrors that Cohen, at 5 feet, 6 inches, hadn’t expected.

Tucked inside, fully dressed and carrying only a small water bottle, he fought dehydration and occasionally lost consciousness while the box sat on a loading dock for more than four hours in 90-degree heat. Stuffed inside the Amtrak cargo car, Cohen refused to get out during the 2 1/2-hour ride from Philadelphia to New York City.

“Every time I thought of getting out of the box, I thought, ‘Henry Brown was in his box for 26 hours,’ ” he said. “And every time I heard a noise or thought I heard somebody near the box, I completely forgot how uncomfortable I was and concentrated on survival.”

Leaving the box at last, inside New York City’s Penn Station, was a revelation. “It was like, wow, I am so glad to be alive,” Cohen said. “What I got for the first time was a sense of what it means to earn freedom.”

The experience was so enlightening that he plans to repeat it during his next research trip. That will begin in the Deep South, take him through the Midwest and include a chase by hunters with dogs.

Challenges and contradictions run in Cohen’s blood. In 1997, this descendant of slaves and Confederate soldiers, both black and white, became the first black member of the Maryland chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

His father was a government scientist; his mother, an educator. Growing up in a Union border state, Cohen spent years tracing six routes of escape through Maryland and the District of Columbia.

His 40-page booklet on the Underground Railroad through Montgomery County is available through the county’s historical society. A film documenting the first trip is already planned, and Cohen hopes to donate profits to restore Underground Railroad safe houses.

His motivation: enlightenment. “I think we have got to be a more truthful nation,” he said. “People are so jittery about race that when you talk about slavery, blacks are filled with shame and anger, and whites are filled with shame and guilt. It’s a dirty secret everybody knows about but no one wants to talk about.”

Cohen’s experiences help tell the full story of the Underground Railroad, said Gerald Horne, a history professor at University of North Carolina who directs the Institute of African-American Research.

“There is obviously something that’s missing when one is just using documents and recounting history,” he said. “I think it can portray, in graphic terms, the often wrenching experience the African slaves had to endure in order to escape bondage.”