Philadelphia, 1825: five young, free black boys fall into the clutches of a fearsome gang of kidnappers and slavers. Lured onto a small ship, they are met with blindfolds, ropes, and knives. For months, their kidnappers drive them overland into the Cotton Kingdom to be sold as slaves, but the boys form a tight brotherhood as they struggle to free themselves and find their way home. Their ordeal shines a glaring spotlight on the Reverse Underground Railroad, a black market network of human traffickers and slave traders who stole away thousands of legally free African Americans from their families in order to fuel slavery’s rapid expansion in the decades before the Civil War.
Reccommended: Richard Bell, Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and their Astonishing Odyssey Home (37 Ink, 2019).