Explore the story of five black boys abducted by the Reverse Underground Railroad and the efforts to rescue them, the boys’ attempts to escape, and the fight bring their abductors to justice.  

Join AARP Virginia and attendees from across the U.S. on April 28, 2021 at 2:15 PM ET | 11:15 AM PT for a virtual complimentary class offered by the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at George Mason University (OLLI-Mason). AARP Membership not required.

OLLI-Mason provides intellectual and cultural experiences in a welcoming atmosphere to Northern Virginia residents in their retirement years. AARP Virginia is excited to collaborate with them to provide a sampling of their Spring semester!

Philadelphia, 1825: five young, free Black boys fall into the clutches of the most fearsome gang of kidnappers and slavers in the United States. Lured onto a small ship with the promise of food and pay, they are instead met with blindfolds, ropes, and knives. Over four long months, their kidnappers drive them overland into the Cotton Kingdom to be sold as slaves. Determined to resist, the boys form a tight brotherhood as they struggle to free themselves and find their way home. Their ordeal—an odyssey that takes them from the Philadelphia waterfront to the marshes of Mississippi and then onward still—shines a glaring spotlight on the Reverse Underground Railroad, a black market network of human traffickers and slave traders who stole away from their families thousands of legally free African Americans in order to fuel slavery’s rapid expansion in the decades before the Civil War.

Dr. Richard Bell is a professor of history at the University of Maryland and author of the new book Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and their Astonishing Odyssey Home.

Sign up for one, two, or all six complimentary classes at aarp.org/OLLI-Mason. To learn more about OLLI-Mason, visit olli.gmu.edu.

You will receive a Zoom link to attend this class 24 hours prior to the class beginning. Do not opt-out of receiving emails as you will not get the Zoom link.