Kirjahaku

Go Stand Upon the Rock is a deeply moving story based on real people and events in the lives of a runaway slave and his family, who witness some of the most compelling moments in antebellum American history. It is a tale of unsettling plantation life, courageous women, dramatic Civil War battles, heroes and hoodoo, and the indomitable strength of the human spirit. This novel is based on the family history handed down to me by my maternal grandmother, Maud Ray Ridley Ortiga - the granddaughter of former runaway slaves. Fiercely proud of our ancestors, I spent countless hours at my grandmother's table, committing this history to memory as we poured over a trove of antique family photographs. I grew to love these forebears who died long before I was born, and I eventually became the family historian. This made me determined to achieve two lifelong goals. The first was to see that my ancestors no longer rested in unmarked graves. The second was to solve the mysteries of who we were, where we came from and how we came to be. After my ancestors escaped from slavery in the mid-1860s, no one in my family had ever returned to our places of origin -- in fact, no one even knew where they were. What began as a noble quest to uncover my roots became a cultural detective story, with only the names of the plantations and slave quarters serving as paltry clues. As I grew into adulthood, I discovered the remarkable accuracy of the age-old family tradition of oral history, and everything my beloved grandmother told me proved to be true. I added to this body of knowledge through historical and genealogical research at the National Archives, the U.S. Census, and countless books and websites, all of which enabled me to turn my love of family history into a doctoral dissertation at one of the most distinguished academic institutions in America -- the University of Pennsylvania -- where I earned a doctorate in Education, Culture, and Society in 2007. The story begins on the Bonnie Doon plantation in Southampton County, Virginia, where my ancestor Cornelius Ridley -- the mulatto son of his wealthy, slavemaster/father -- was born in 1839 - eight years after Nat Turner's Rebellion. But no rosy or revisionist retrospective on genteel plantation society, this book examines the historical events and complex social and sometimes biological relationships between masters and slaves. Go Stand Upon the Rock is a tapestry of interwoven stories of a remarkable family's journey through history that began with my great-great grandfather Cornelius Ridley's epic 300 mile walk to freedom in the North to escape from bondage on his putative father's plantation. It also follows his wife Martha Jane Parham, as she strives to escape her horrible fate as a breeding woman on the neighboring Fortsville Plantation. Learning what she endured made an indelible impact on me. Unlike her husband who was able to pass for white, they were forced to escape separately. And the story follows her perilous flight with two young children, to the safety of a company of U.S. Colored Troops, where she meets a young black soldier from Pennsylvania who is wounded during one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War - the Battle of New Market Heights - who has an unexpected role in her life half a century later. This first part of the Ridley family saga draws to a close with Cornelius and Martha Jane's brilliant son William - a pioneering African American law student - who miraculously survives a hail of bullets in the midst of a dangerous political dispute in Chester, Pennsylvania, that nearly ends his life and legal career captured in detail in local contemporary newspaper accounts just one month before his marriage to an elegant, mysterious clairvoyant woman from the Danish West Indies in October 1889.Telling the story of my ancestors is a debt I have longed owed them, because they are giants upon whose shoulders I stand today. And there is much more of their saga to tell.

The Case that Shocked the Country: The Unquiet deaths of Vida Robare, and Alexander McClay Williams -- the youngest person to die in the electric chair in Pennsylvania -- for a crime he did not commit, recounts an actual 1930 murder case in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. This stunning story sent shockwaves across the country as it flashed across newspaper headlines as far away as Texas, California, and Canada. It is a compelling combination of legal history, a real life murder mystery, and a 30 year quest for justice for a long forgotten 16 year old African American youth buried in an unmarked grave, who remains the youngest known person, to date, to die in Pennsylvania's electric chair. On Friday afternoon, October 3, 1930, the lifeless body of a popular white school matron was discovered in her bedroom covered in blood. The victim had sustained a brutal beating and was stabbed 47 times with an ice pick. There were no witnesses to the crime and scant evidence, except for the victim's missing key ring and the bloody handprint of an adult male left on the wallpaper by the door of her room, as her killer made his escape. Four days later, at what was then a tough reform school originally founded in Philadelphia, 16 year old Alexander McClay Williams - the eldest in an impoverished family of 13 children - "confessed" to the crime after repeated interrogations under undocumented circumstances, conducted without his parents or an attorney present in the room. Nearly three weeks after the learning disabled teenager signed not one, but three, confessions, the court appointed the county's only African America attorney - William Henry Ridley, Esq. (1867 - 1945) - to represent the youth. But his fate seemed already set. At the zenith of a remarkable 54-year career as a practicing attorney, Ridley would face insurmountable challenges with just two months to prepare a defense in his young client's capital murder case. How could Ridley overcome the stark realities of three dubious confessions, tampered evidence, a biased legal system, and an all-white jury that was understandably aghast at perhaps the most horrendous crime in county memory? Decades after his client was buried in an unmarked grave in a now abandoned cemetery, something curious happened. While living in the Ridley family's home when he was just a boy, the author first learned of this tragic story from his grandmother - the only child of William H. Ridley. Hearing the story left an indelible impression, which he could never forget. And the grisly tale continued to haunt him for decades as he grew into adulthood. As time wore on, the author began to look deeper into the case, digging down to uncover long lost evidence hidden beneath many layers of conflicting details and discrepancies. After gathering a volume of information and examining court documents and countless news articles, what he found shocked him, as it had shocked the country in 1930. He discovered that the frightened teenager who died in the electric chair did not commit the crime, and the real murderer escaped without facing punishment. The case of Alexander McClay Williams is a cautionary tale of what can result when systemic racism taints the criminal justice system, as the dynamics of this case are as crucial and applicable today as they were when these events unfolded 87 years ago. This book is a must read for those interested in the law, capital punishment, juvenile justice, African American history, and how the descendants of three seemingly unrelated families intertwined to try to overturn a monumental injustice for the last surviving sibling of Alexander McClay Williams.