Words are Freedom: Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Written and published in 1861, on the eve of the Civil War, this autobiographical account by Jacobs, a former slave, details her master's cruelty and physical abuse and recounts her harrowing experience as a fugitive attempting to secure her children’s freedom. Pick up a copy of the book at Central Library. Hosted by Sterling Bland, Jr, Chair of African American and African Studies at Rutgers University and author of Voices of the Fugitives: Runaway Slave Stories and Their Fictions of Self-Creation.