Underground Railroad: The William Still Story

SMARDZ FROST

I think it was very much an ad-hoc network that developed to help people - much like the resistant movements did in France and Poland and other places during the second World War - there were cells, there were particular networks but they weren't all connected to one another all the time.

NARRATOR

Legend has it, it was a slave-catcher who gave the Underground Railroad its name when the runaway he was chasing seemed to just disappear as though the earth had swallowed him up. But the name stuck.

JAMES HORTON

The language of the railroad got built into these efforts to escape or to help slaves escape. And so for example, if you were a person who actually helped the slave escape, you might be termed the "conductor" and the place where the slave would be placed for protection might be the underground railroad "station". In some cases, you know, we have some people refer to slaves, especially if there were a number of them, they referred to these people as the passengers or sometimes the cargo.