Freedom for Monticello's African-American residents did not bring an end to their struggles against slavery. They assisted those still in bondage by purchasing family members, forging free papers, and joining the Underground Railroad. After Emancipation, their descendants continued the campaign for liberty and equality-in public assemblies, in newspaper columns, on the field of battle at Vicksburg, or in the skies over Italy.

 
 "Tucker Isaacs, a free mulatto man of this County was this day led to the bar in custody of the jailer of this court, and being charged with having aided Peter, a negro man slave, . . . to abscond from the possession of his master . . . by fals[e]ly, wilfully and feloniously forging and counterfeiting a certain register of freedom . . . ."

--Albemarle County Minute Book, 3 Feb. 1850

Above: Elizabeth-Ann Fossett Isaacs, purchased out of slavery by her family, moved to southern Ohio with her husband, Tucker Isaacs, after his release from arrest for forging free papers in 1850. Their Ohio farm is still remembered as a station on the Underground Railroad.
Right: The Isaacs' grandson, William Monroe Trotter, was a militant advocate for civil rights through his own newspaper, the Boston Guardian. W.E.B. DuBois credited Trotter with "putting the backbone" into the platform of the Niagara Movement, a forerunner of the NAACP.
Below: James Monroe Trotter (right) and William H. Dupree, who married into the Isaacs family, were second lieutenants in the 55th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment in the Civil War.
  

   "We refuse to allow the impression to remain that the Negro-American assents to inferiority, is submissive under oppression and apologetic before insults."

--Niagara Movement "Declaration of Principles," drafted by William Monroe Trotter and W.E.B. DuBois, 1905

 

 

   Left: Thomas C. and Jemima Woodson founded a very successful black farming community in Jackson County, Ohio. They, too, were active in the Underground Railroad and one of their sons, buried in the family plot, was killed for refusing to reveal the hiding place of a fugitive slave. Right: Their son Lewis Woodson, a minister and teacher, has been called the "father of black nationalism."

 

 Left: Lt. James T. Wiley, Lewis Woodson's great-great-grandson, won the Air Medal while serving with the 99th Fighter Squadron in Italy during World War II. Right: John Wayles Jefferson, a lieutenant-colonel in the 8th Wisconsin Regiment in the Civil War, was wounded at Vicksburg. He later owned the Continental Cotton Company in Memphis.		  

 

 

 

 

"My father now resides, and has been for the last eight years residing in such a [separate black] settlement, in Jackson County, Ohio. The settlement is highly prosperous and happy. They have a church, day and Sabbath school of their own. The people of this settlement cut their own harvests, roll their own logs, and raise their own houses, just as well as though they had been assisted by white friends. They find just as ready and as high market for their grain and cattle, as their white neighbors. They take the newspapers and read many useful books, and are making as rapid advancement in intelligence and refinement as any people in the country generally do."
--Lewis Woodson, The Colored American

 

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