Author Mary Kay Ricks will discuss “Escape on the Pearl:  The Story of the Largest Attempted Escape on the Underground Railroad and Its Links to Alexandria” at 7:30 PM at the Lyceum, 201 South Washington Street, Alexandria.  Free.  Open to the public.  No reservations needed.  Information at www.alexandriahistorical.org or 703-683-2636.

This event is sponsored by the Alexandria Historical Society, the Alexandria Archaeology Museum, the Alexandria Black History Museum, the Fort Ward Museum & Historic Site, and the Lyceum – Alexandria’s History Museum.

ESCAPE ON THE PEARL:  THE STORY OF THE LARGEST ATTEMPTED ESCAPE ON THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD AND ITS LINKS TO ALEXANDRIA

Mary Kay Ricks, the author of Escape on the Pearl -- The Heroic Bid for Freedom on the Underground Railroad, will discuss the largest attempted escape on the Underground Railroad and its links to Alexandria.  She will start with an overview that will put the escape into historical context by explaining the growth of slavery.  The agricultural change in this area from tobacco to grains as well as the rise of cotton in the Lower South had a significant impact on the institution of slavery.  Together with the ban on the trans-Atlantic slave trade, this brought about an internal slave trade that some historians say transported more slaves from the Upper South to the Lower South than were transported across the Atlantic.  This domestic slave trade, with a very strong presence in Alexandria, played a huge role in sending enslaved people from the Upper South to seek out the Underground Railroad. 

In detailing the escape on the Pearl, Ms. Ricks will also discuss how ending slavery in the District of Columbia was a centerpiece of the campaign of Northern radical abolitionists and how the capital became a site for an Underground Railroad cell - the only one to flourish in slave territory.  Through the surprisingly well-detailed records involving both the escape and the history of the Edmonson family, who had six siblings on board the Pearl and were purchased by Alexandrian Joseph Bruin after their capture, a good deal can be said about the black community, both free and enslaved, and the role they played in the escape attempt.

Mary Kay Ricks, the author of Escape on the Pearl – the Heroic Bid for Freedom on the Underground Railroad (William Morrow 2007), received a Juris Doctor from Antioch Law School in 1979.  She was admitted to the District of Columbia Bar and worked as an attorney/adviser at the U.S. Department of Labor for over sixteen years, both as a staff member and as a contract worker when out of Washington with her journalist husband, Thomas E. Ricks, the author of Fiasco, the American Military Adventure in Iraq. 

In 1997, Ricks began writing about Washington history.  One article in the Washington Post featured the Library of Congress’s Geography and Map Room, which the library reproduced as a poster.  She has also written for Washington History Magazine, and more than twenty travel pieces for various history and tour-related tour magazines and websites.  At the same time, Ricks established Tour DC, her own walking tour company, which emphasizes original documents, public records, and 19th century legal cases.  In 1998, the Washington Post published Escape on the Pearl, an in-depth feature article by Ricks on the largest attempted escape on the Underground Railroad, which took place in the nation’s capital in 1848.  In 2000, WAMU-FM, the NPR-affiliated station operated by American University in Washington, D.C., featured her in “Life in a Small Southern Town,” a documentary/drama on the Pearl saga based on that article.  That program was broadcast nationally and continues to be aired during Black History month.  A second article, profiling the Edmonsons, a family with six brothers and sisters on the Pearl, was published in the Washington Post Magazine in 2002.  Subsequently, Escape on the Pearl was published in January 2007, with a paperback edition issued in January 2008.  In April of 2007, Ricks presented a paper at a conference on the theme of slavery and the U.S. Congress at the U.S. Capitol Historical Society under the leadership of Professor Paul Finkelman.  It is scheduled to be published by the Ohio University Press.

Ricks frequently lectures on the story of the Pearl escape and other 19th century topics.  She also has written and directed living history that was performed in partnership with the National Park Service and the Mt. Zion United Methodist Church, the first black congregation formed in the District of Columbia.  In 2003, Ricks also wrote a living history performance for the Smithsonian Institution’s first nationwide conference on the Underground Railroad called “Passages to Freedom – The Underground Railroad in American History and Legend.” 

Submitted by:
Bob Madison
Vice President
Alexandria Historical Society
(703) 683-2636