MUSCATINE, Iowa — About 50 visitors to the Musser Public Library packed together in an upstairs room, nearly running out of chairs, for guest speaker Galain Barrier on Tuesday night.

Barrier, an adjunct instructor of history at Des Moines Area Community College in Ankeny, presented his research and manuscript from the chapter of his book on the Underground Railroad in Iowa, “Outside In: African-American History in Iowa, 1838-2000,” published in 2001. His presentation Tuesday night focused not only on the history of the Underground Railroad in Iowa, but the oral histories and stories of individuals who passed through it.

“I am embarrassed to say I didn’t find Muscatine in here,” Barrier said, flipping through the book to which he contributed. “Except for Alexander Clark Sr.; he was for Iowa as Frederick Douglass was for the United States.”

Clark, known as the “Colored Orator of the West,” was one of many in the nation fighting on behalf of the “freedom seekers,” the runaway slaves hoping to find freedom in the north and in Canada.

As Barrier conducted his research, he was amazed at the various Underground Railroad activities happening across the state, and much information he continues to discover today. In many stories it comes down “not to truth versus legend but truth versus typical,” he said.

One story he discovered in his research was the diary of a young man whose family had housed a female slave for six weeks as she waited for the river to freeze over so she could cross.

“Missouri and border states were primary for runaways,” he said. “Very few successfully escaped the South.”

Barrier is quick to reiterate that although the Underground Railroad is associated with white abolitionists, there were very few at the time. The true heroes, he said, were the slaves daring themselves for a better life.

“Once they made it to freedom, they became stations and conductors of the Railroad themselves,” Barrier said.

Library director Pam Collins said the chance to bring Barrier to the library as a speaker was a great link to the other African-American events being hosted over the next month.

Later this month, the library will host two sets of “Follow the Drinking  Gourd,” one for children on Thursday, Sept. 17 and the other for the whole family on Friday, Sept. 18. The events will teach children how to look at the stars the way runaway slaves once did — using it as a map to freedom.

“I think it’s really interesting,” Collins said. “We know the Underground Railroad happened but we didn’t know what it was like – and he gave us these individuals and their stories. It’s incredible.”

Details

About Alexander G. Clark

Alexander G. Clark was born in 1826 in Washington County, Penn., and came to Bloomington (now Muscatine) when he was 16.

During his lifetime he was a barber, investor, entrepreneur, educator, soldier, politician, attorney, newspaper publisher, a statesman and U.S. minister to Liberia.

Clark set up a barber shop, married, raised a family, invested in real estate and organized the now-disbanded Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church of Muscatine.

He became known as the “Colored Orator of the West,” and the oration at his funeral declared him “one of the Underground Railroad engineers and conductors, whose field was the South, whose depot was the North, and whose freight was human souls.”

His son, Alexander, became the first black graduate of the University of Iowa Law School in 1879, and Clark himself became the second in 1884.

Source: Muscatine Journal