Faith and Freedom: St. James AME Zion Church and the Underground Railroad

Ithaca was one of many stops along the Underground Railroad within the state of New York. Freedom seekers likely traveled through Elmira in the southern part of New York before heading north to Ithaca. From Ithaca, they could travel by land and water to safehouses in Auburn, and other towns near or along the Erie Canal on their way to freedom in Canada, especially after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which allowed slavecatchers to cross state lines.

The Underground Railroad was made up of a wide-reaching and diverse community, with some well-known abolitionists having documented connections to Ithaca and St. James AME Zion Church. Frederick Douglass, who spoke at St.James and called it the “neatest, cleanest, colored meeting house,” was one of the seminal figures of the abolitionist movement in the US and a former enslaved person. He provided lodging for an estimated four-hundred people traveling along the Underground Railroad.

Harriet Tubman, who lived 40 miles from St. James, had often visited the church and Ithaca, where she was known as “Aunt Harriet.” An active member of the AME Zion denomination, she is famously known as the “Moses” of her people and to have shepherded groups of enslaved people from the South to the North to deliver them from bondage.

Given the rise and extension of the railroad system across the country beginning in the 1830s, Underground Railroad operatives and travelers ingeniously employed the language of the new transportation technology as a secret code to help freedom seekers move along the network clandestinely.

Because of the enormous dangers involved, the coded language of the Underground Railroad also drew from the Bible, faith, and spirituality to provide enslaved people with the resolve to follow the North Star to freedom.

In its musicality, lyrics, and invocation, Negro spirituals manifest and interpret a wide range of human experiences from personal stories to abolitionist and civil rights activism. Song by St. James Congregant Annie Lovett, recorded at St. James AME Zion Church. 

Since the clandestine activity of the Underground Railroad was meant to be secret for the protection of freedom seekers and those who assisted them, there is little documentation of people's movement and experiences that was written by them. An oral history of the church's role as a stop along the Underground Railroad has been passed down through the congregation at St. James, providing insight on this history.