The Underground Railroad was a secret network of anti-slavery sympathizers, including free blacks and Northern abolitionists, who defied the Fugitive Slave Act to help escaped slaves on to freedom in the North and Canada. The best-known of the Underground Railroad “conductors” was Harriet Tubman, who led about 300 Maryland slaves to freedom in Canada.
Benjamin Banneker (1731–1806) was an influential African American intellectual in early America. Born free in Maryland, Banneker became an accomplished mathematician, astronomer, surveyor, and writer. In 1791, Banneker was selected to be part of team approved by George Washington to survey and plan the new national capital at Washington, DC; a park in the city was eventually named in his honor. Banneker was best known for the almanacs he published from 1791 to 1797; he sent a copy of his first almanac to Thomas Jefferson, challenging the...
Thurgood Marshall (1908–1993), an African American lawyer and US Supreme Court justice, was born in Baltimore, Maryland. Marshall attended a segregated high school in Baltimore and then went to Lincoln University, where the student body was all black and the faculty all white. Because the University of Maryland Law School refused to accept African Americans, Marshall’s mother pawned her engagement and wedding rings so he could attend Howard Law School. With the legislative and executive branches of government largely...
Mary Katherine Goddard (1738–1816) was the printer of the first copy of the Declaration of Independence to include the names of the signers in January 1777. Goddard was also the editor and publisher of various Revolutionary-era colonial newspapers, an unusual occupation for a woman at the time. Goddard was appointed postmaster of Baltimore of 1775, likely making her the first woman to hold that position anywhere in America. In 1789, however, she was replaced by a male colleague despite protests by the citizens of Baltimore.
![Recens Edita totius Novi Belgii [New Netherland - New York], 1730. (Gilder Lehrm](http://www.gilderlehrman.org/sites/default/files/imagecache/aggregate-208x148/content-images/03583_0.jpg "Recens Edita totius Novi Belgii [New Netherland - New York], 1730. (Gilder Lehrman Collection)")