On September 11, 1851, Joshua Kite and six other African American rebels crouched in a small farmhouse near Christiana, Pennsylvania. They were poised to resist the slave-owner, Edward Gorsuch, who had come to capture enslaved people who had escaped from his Maryland plantation.

Kite and several others who had escaped to Christiana had joined a community of free and fugitive African Americans, who lived near some sympathetic White antislavery Quakers. Having heard that Kite was staying with William and Eliza Parker, a Black family in Christiana, Gorsuch arrived, with a United States marshal, to reclaim his human “property.” But William Parker told the marshal that he wasn’t afraid of him, or of the United States. And Eliza Parker told the escaped slaves hiding in their house that she would kill them with a corn cutter if they attempted to surrender to the marshal. Eliza Parker was just one example of Black women who stood up against the system of slavery.

The 1851 Christiana Resistance struck terror in the hearts of slaveholders, and it increased African Americans’ hope and pride. The Fugitive Slave Law, passed in 1850, made it a federal crime to help runaway slaves. But many Black women joined their husbands and brothers in standing up against the system of slavery. One such woman was Harriet Tubman, who escaped from enslavement in Maryland in 1849. She then returned, more than a dozen times, to guide other enslaved people to freedom. The following year, Sojourner Truth, who had escaped from slavery in New York State, published her life story of resistance to the system of slavery. And the light-skinned enslaved woman Ellen Craft published the story of her daring escape with her brown-skinned husband. He pretended to be her servant as they traveled, by train, from enslavement in Georgia to freedom in Philadelphia. At about the same time, Delaware-born Mary Ann Shadd started The Provincial Freeman, an anti-slavery newspaper, in Ontario, Canada. By doing so, she became the first woman newspaper publisher in Canada and the first Black woman newspaper publisher in North America. Full of ideas for creating opportunities for resistance, Shadd also started an interracial school in Ontario. In the 1870s, Shadd completed law school and continued her work for racial justice until her death in 1893. And in 1851, Harriet Beecher Stowe, a White abolitionist, showcased other Black women’s courage in her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which became an international best-seller.

Beginning as early as the 1830s, African American individuals organized what one historian named an “abolitionist sisterhood.” These included Maria Stewart of Boston, the first American woman to speak in front of a public audience and leave a record of her speech; Grace Douglass and her daughter Sarah in Philadelphia, who organized schools for Black children, and joined with several White abolitionist to establish the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society; Black women across the Atlantic coast established schools for Black children and networks to help refugees from enslavement to find safety, shelter, food, and medical care. And some of the boldest Black women—such as Harriet Jacobs, a fugitive from South Carolina enslavement—even published their autobiographies.