While conducting research, Dr. Erica Armstrong Dunbar came across an advertisement for a runaway enslaved person.
President George Washington was in search of his wife’s enslaved housemaid, Ona “Oney” Judge—who escaped from the President’s House in Philadelphia in 1796 at the age of 22.
As George and Martha Washington prepared to return to Mount Vernon, Virginia, Judge fled the household and boarded a boat headed to Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
“I was immediately taken with this story,” said Dunbar, who holds the Charles and Mary Beard Distinguished Professorship of History at Rutgers University and is one of the nation’s most prominent historians. “Who was this young 20-something year old woman who found the courage to defy the most powerful family in the nation? I was struck by the fact that I didn’t know her story and I was someone who is supposedly an expert in early African American women’s history.”
Inspired by her courage, Dunbar spent 10 years researching and writing the book Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge, which was published in 2017 to positive reviews.
“[Her story] resonates in this moment,” Dunbar said in an interview with Diverse. “It resonates today as we hear this sentencing for Derek Chauvin and this larger continued struggle for Black freedom. We can look backwards. We can look at Ona’s story and contextualize the struggle for Black freedom beginning before the nation was founded.”
Unknown to Dunbar, a fourth-grade class in Fairfax County, Virginia had also taken a keen interest in Judge’s story.
