The details are as engrossing as they are unfamiliar to most Americans.
On April 15, 1848, the Pearl schooner was docked at the wharf located at the foot of Seventh Street in Washington, DC, waiting for passengers to arrive. The wharf was situated in a less-traveled area of Southwest DC and was chosen for its secluded location. The high riverbank, wide stretches of fields, and the lack of buildings in the vicinity provided the secrecy that the Pearl’s passengers required.
As the inaugural fellow for Slavery and Its Legacies in Washington, DC—an innovative partnership between AU’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center (ARPC) and the White House Historical Association (WHHA)—Mia Owens, CAS/MA ’22, has spent the last two years helping to create a more inclusive record of the Federal City’s complicated past and the paradoxical relationship between freedom and slavery in the nation’s capital.
Over the course of the evening, 77 enslaved people silently boarded the schooner. To avoid raising any suspicion, the passengers hid below deck. By the end of the night, there were 38 men, 26 women, and 13 children huddled together in the cargo hold, all willing to risk their lives to escape slavery.
The fellowship was born in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Amid the fall of Confederate statutes and unprecedented calls to dismantle unjust and racist institutions, an opportunity arose for public historians—those who collect stories, sometimes just in bits and pieces, and stitch them together into a rich, patchworked archive—to reexamine our city’s past with a more critical eye.
“The fellowship has done so many important things,” says Sara Clarke Kaplan, ARPC’s executive director. “By increasing public knowledge around the impact and influence of slavery, this collaboration contributes to our ongoing national reckoning with a history of systemic racism. At the same time, the fellowship supports the education and training of students committed to creating future forms of public history that increase racial justice.”
“We’re trying to focus more on communities that don’t have substantial archival material, or that have simply been overlooked,” adds Owens. “One of my favorite parts of the fellowship was having conversations with scholars and historians and librarians and seeing how everyone is working together to fill in the gaps and make this history more visible to the public.”
Under the cover of night, the Pearl lifted anchor and set sail along the Potomac River toward the Chesapeake Bay, and charted course towards Frenchtown, New Jersey. Changing tides and unfavorable winds slowed the schooner’s progress. The Pearl’s enslaved passengers anxiously waited in the hold, hoping that no one would notice their absence.
As Owens writes in “Running from the Temple of Liberty: The Pearl Incident”—one of two articles she contributed to WHHA’s extensive and ever-growing digital archive—the stowaways’ harrowing escape was thwarted when 30 White men boarded the rickety ship in Point Lookout, Maryland, where it had anchored to ride out a storm. The Pearl’s passengers and crew were then shackled and paraded through the streets of Washington to the DC jail.
Had they made it to freedom, just 225 miles north, off the banks of the Delaware River, perhaps more Americans would know their story. But thanks to WHHA’s Slavery in the President’s Neighborhood initiative, that gap in the historical record has been filled with abundant detail drawn from letters, documents, and other sources. And “we now know more about the bonds that existed in Washington between communities of enslaved people, free African Americans, and the abolitionists,” Owens says, “and the inspiring ways they tried to work together.”
In addition to her work with WHHA, Owens also focused on the findings of the AU working group convened in 2018 to examine the influences of slavery on the university. She helped create a subject guide—a living document available through the library’s website—that includes the histories of previous landowners, the origins of AU, and its founder, Bishop John Fletcher Hurst.
Owens, who graduated in May, is currently working as a research intern at the Smithsonian’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and as a research associate with the 1882 Foundation. She hopes to take all that she’s learned and done at AU back to her native Birmingham, Alabama, to help residents there dig into their own complicated history around civil rights.
This fall, Joshua Johnson, CAS/MA ’23, whose research focuses on unmarked African American burial sites, will pick up where Owens left off, unearthing stories of race and place through the changemaking fellowship that’s changing how we think about our past.