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Award-winning author Karolyn Smardz Frost shares stories of freedom in honour of Black History Month

In honour of Black History Month, the Tecumseth and West Gwillimbury Historical Society hosted an evening with award-winning author Smardz Frost in Newton Robinson on Monday night

As one of a few experts in Canada on the history of the Underground Railroad, archaeologist, historian, and Governor General award winning author, Karolyn Smardz Frost, is in high demand. 

In honour of Black History Month, the Tecumseth and West Gwillimbury Historical Society hosted a well-attended evening with Smardz Frost in Newton Robinson on Monday night. The talk was one of 10 in 11 days she has scheduled while on a leave from her part-time teaching position at Acadie University, Nova Scotia. 

Smardz Frost won the 2007 GG Non-Fiction Award for I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land: A Lost Tale of the Underground Railroad. It is a biography of Thornton and Lucie Blackburn, freedom seekers, who made a “daring daylight escape with forged freedom papers, by steamboat from the docks of Loisville, Kentucky in 1831.” 

The Blackburns eventually arrived in Toronto through the Underground Railway: not an actual railroad but a very secretive system of travelling to freedom in Canada from the southern United States. 

Smardz Frost’s latest book, Steal Away Home: One Woman's Epic Flight to Freedom-and Her Long Road Back to the South is the true story of Cecelia Jane Reynolds, who escaped at the age of 15 from Kentucky in 1847, also reaching Toronto. Her relationship with her former female owner is unique and complex shown through a series of letters. This book has also won awards, and is up for a five-part mini-series by the same people who created The Book of Negroes television mini-series. 

Smardz Frost engaged the audience in Newton Robinson with an overview of each of these stories. 

She says, “There are so many people interested in these stories of incredibly brave human beings who came to this country, built new homes, and families, and churches, and lives having incredible barriers behind them, and lots of barriers when they arrived too. Racism did not stop at the border and yet they have gone on to contribute in so many ways to Canadian society.”

She hopes telling about the bravery, contributions, and courage of these men, women, and children who came from slavery and helped build freedom, will alleviate prejudice still found in this country. 

Smardz Frost also told the story on Monday night of how she unearthed each of these stories. While doing archaeology in the Toronto area in the 1980s with school children on the grounds of the old Sackville Street School near the distillery district, she “tripped over” the Underground Railway site that became the first ever to be dug in Canada. 

She says, “We excavated their home and I fell in love with the Blackburns. And I spent the next 20 years of my life, every holiday, every dime I had going to Kentucky, going to Virginia. I went to 13 American states tracing their story. Nobody had ever done this before; an original story of a fugitive couple from scratch. They couldn’t read or write and had no children, so it was particularly challenging.” 

She went back in the middle of all that to do a doctorate in African Canadian and African American History to be able to do a better job on the first book. She has a doctorate in Race, Slavery and Imperialism. She is a Senior Research Fellow for the Harriet Tubman Institute, York University, Toronto, and a Harrison McCain Visiting Professor at Nova Scotia’s Acadia University

Her thesis director was concerned about her being accepted to the PHD program because she didn’t write very academically. She says, “I prefer to make my material accessible to people so they can understand it. I got the Governor General’s award for not writing academically.”