A Colgate University professor has been awarded the highest honor bestowed in the international Underground Railroad community. Graham Hodges was honored by the Underground Railroad Free Press last month for his biography “David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City.” The biography tells the life story of one of the boldest African-American agents...
A Colgate University professor has been awarded the highest honor bestowed in the international Underground Railroad community.
Graham Hodges was honored by the Underground Railroad Free Press last month for his biography “David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City.”
The biography tells the life story of one of the boldest African-American agents of the Underground Railroad.
Ruggles assisted more than 400 slaves on their way to freedom, including a young Frederick Douglass, who he found hungry and homeless on the docks in New York City.
Before spending the last 10 years researching Ruggles, Hodges published “Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey” and “Slavery, Freedom & Culture Among Early American Workers.”
Hodges said the study of the Underground Railroad and the abolition movement comes from “an abiding desire Americans have in this historical process in which white and black, male and female Americans worked together to secure the freedom of those in bondage.”
Hodges is the son of the late Rev. Graham Rushing Hodges, who devoted more than 40 years of his life to ministry in Syracuse.
The elder Hodges was among those who pushed for the Voting Rights and the Civil Rights acts of the 1960s. That activity helped his son understand the importance of learning from history.
“Historians have identified slavery as our greatest national sin,” said Hodges, who hosted 25 educators at Colgate last summer for a monthlong institute on Central New York’s role in abolitionism and the Underground Railroad. It was sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
“Researching and learning about the Underground Railroad helps us find sunlight in that dark night of our history,” he said.
Other proponents of abolition will be honored this coming weekend at the National Abolition Hall of Fame and Museum in Peterboro.
Contact Alaina Potrikus at apotrikus@syracuse.com or 470-3252.