Underground Railroad conductor to be pardoned 168 years after conviction for aiding slaves

(CNN)More than a century before the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his famous open letter from the Birmingham jail, another incarcerated champion of civil disobedience penned a powerful missive against racial injustice.

Samuel D. Burris, a free black man, railed against those who enacted laws that allowed slave traffickers to freely conduct business in Delaware.

"They uphold and applaud those slave traffickers, and those inhuman and unmerciful leeches, in their soul-damning conduct, by making the colored people legal subjects for their bloody principles to feast on," wrote Burris, who was languishing in a Dover jail, in a letter published in a June 1848 edition of The Liberator, an abolitionist newspaper.

On Monday morning, Delaware's governor will pardon Burris, an Underground Railroad "conductor" who today is considered a hero for helping escaped slaves find their way to freedom.

Gov. Jack Markell's declaration will come in the same building where Burris was tried and on the 168th anniversary of the date he was convicted for aiding and abetting slaves.

Burris' courage is particularly notable because, unlike the white abolitionists with whom he worked, the father of five children and husband to Catherine could be sold into slavery for his actions. He eventually was ordered to be sold into servitude, or slavery, for two periods of seven years each.

"The man put his life on the line and the life of his family on the line to do work that was illegal at the time," said Robin Krawitz, a Delaware State University historian writing a book about Burris. "We can look back and say that our system was wrong. He was not wrong, he was practicing civil disobedience."

The story doesn't end with Burris' conviction.

eddie wrote:Underground Railroad conductors are a little like other conductors, “electric conductors”, for instance.

Here is an explanation of an “electric conductor” taken from Wikipedia:

In physics and electrical engineering, a conductor is an object or type of material that allows the flow of an electrical current in one or more directions. Materials made of metal are common electrical conductors.

Now that, blows my mind...much like a lightbulb when it explodes cos it’s run out.
That’s electricity right there. Yeah baby.

*THE Ben Reilly* wrote:

eddie wrote:Underground Railroad conductors are a little like other conductors, “electric conductors”, for instance.

Here is an explanation of an “electric conductor” taken from Wikipedia:

In physics and electrical engineering, a conductor is an object or type of material that allows the flow of an electrical current in one or more directions. Materials made of metal are common electrical conductors.

Now that, blows my mind...much like a lightbulb when it explodes cos it’s run out.
That’s electricity right there. Yeah baby.

I'm feeling a little electricity in my pants just reading that, baby!

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