Unit 3: The Secret Road to Freedom (1ère G6_gr1)

Land of the Free, Home of the Brave?

The document under study is an interview an African-American writer called Colson Whitehead. He wrote a novel entitled “The Underground Railroad”, published in 2017. We have learned that he was inspired from reality to create a fictional story around the Underground Railroad. In fact, in reality the Underground Railroad was a metaphoric network created by the fugitive slaves to escape in secret from their masters. However, in Whitehead’s book, he wrote about a real underground railroad built beneath the earth that his characters would take to go from the southern states to the free states in the North. Moreover, to write his novel he was inspired by slave narratives that he had read before, such as the lives of Harriet Jacob and Frederick Douglass, two famous former slaves.

Homework: Learn the lesson.