"Asking the Way to Mexico" Engineering Freedom from Missouri to the Southern Borderlands

Maria Esther Hammack, PhD, Assistant Professor of African American History at The Ohio State University delivered the African American Experience in Missouri lecture on Oct. 1, 2025, at the State Historical Society of Missouri. Dr. Hammack explored the story of Roda, a 19-year-old Black woman who fled her enslaver in Missouri in 1855. Roda made her way to the southern border of Mexico, rather than taking the Underground Railroad to the northern free states. Would her freedom in the north be in jeopardy by the Fugitive Slave law? If she made it even further to Canada, could she be extradited and sent back to a slave state? At the time, slaveholders and slave hunters had no legal right to pursue Black Americans who reached Mexico because the government refused to sign a treaty for the extradition of formerly enslaved persons already living as free women, men, and children in the country. Like Roda, many enslaved people across Missouri pursued freedom in Mexico. Dr. Hammack's talk will highlight a few of their stories and the realities of their pursuits on which freedom materialized or failed for them.

Dr. Hammack is a Mexican scholar and public historian whose work explores the intertwined histories of liberation and abolition across the United States, Mexico, and Canada. Her upcoming book, Channels of Liberation: Freedom Fighters in the Age of Abolition, reimagines the Underground Railroad by expanding the stories, timelines, and geographies of Black freedom.

Professor Hammack's lecture was recorded October 1, 2025, at the State Historical Society of Missouri Center for Missouri Studies in Columbia, Mo.