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GBN’s Daily Drop: Ona “Oney” Judge – the Enslaved Woman Who Escaped as George Washington Ate (LISTEN)

GBN’s Daily Drop: Ona “Oney” Judge – the Enslaved Woman Who Escaped as George Washington Ate (LISTEN)

By goodblacknews on February 21, 2022

by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson)

Today’s GBN Daily Drop Podcast for Monday, February 21, 2022, based on the  “A Year of Good Black News” Page-A-Day®️ Calendar for 2022 format. It’s about Ona “Oney” Judge, who was enslaved by George Washington and Martha Washington, escaped and despite Washington’s position of power as President, was never caught.

You can also follow or subscribe to the Good Black News Daily Drop Podcast through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, rss.com or create your own RSS Feed. Or just check it out every day here on the main website (transcript below):

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Hey, this Lori Lakin Hutcherson, founder and editor in chief of goodblacknews.org, here to share with you a daily drop of Good Black News for Monday, February 21th, 2022, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar” published by Workman Publishing. Today, on President’s Day, we are honoring someone who was all too familiar with America’s first president George Washington — and her name was Ona “Oney” Judge.

Ona “Oney” Judge knew there was no time like dinnertime to make her escape. Enslaved by President George Washington and his wife, Martha, in 1796 Judge secretly booked passage on a boat and left the then capital, Philadelphia, as the Washingtons ate, determined not to return to their plantation in Mount Vernon and remain enslaved.

Judge hid in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, by then a free state, and as president, Washington knew the scrutiny would be bad if he used a slave catcher. Instead, he sent emissaries after her three times, but Judge refused to return.

Though she was technically was still a fugitive when Washington died in 1799, she was finally left alone, free and “never caught.” On February 25, 2008, Philadelphia celebrated the first “Oney Judge Day” at the President’s House site.

To learn more about Judge, read the 2018 book Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge by Erica Armstrong Dunbar or the 2020 children’s book Never Caught, the Story of Ona Judge: George and Martha Washington’s Courageous Slave Who Dared to Run Away; Young Readers Edition, also by Erica Armstrong Dunbar, you can watch the Museum of the American Revolution’s Ona Judge Virtual Tour on YouTube or check out the links to other sources provided in today’s show notes and in the episode’s full transcript posted on goodblacknews.org.

I also want to take a second to make a personal note that whenever I’m presenting anything I will say “an enslaved person” or “people” because no one was born a slave and that’s a status that’s put upon them by society. But if it’s the term like “slave catcher” or it’s a title of a book I will say what is written. Other than that though? “Enslaved person, enslaved people.” Happy President’s Day.

This has been a daily drop of Good Black News, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar for 2022,” published by Workman Publishing, and available at workman.com, Amazon,Bookshop and other online retailers.

Beats provided by freebeats.io and produced by White Hot.  Additional music included and permitted under Public Domain license was “Stars and Stripes Forever” composed by John Philip Sousa.

For more Good Black News, check out goodblacknews.org or search and follow @goodblacknews anywhere on social.

Sources:

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BOOKS: "Never Caught" Tells Story of Ona Judge, Enslaved Woman who Escaped and Defied President Washington

BOOKS: "Never Caught" Tells Story of Ona Judge, Enslaved Woman who Escaped and Defied President Washington

By goodblacknews on February 11, 2017

512y-xth0ilarticle by Jennifer Schuessler via nytimes.com
MOUNT VERNON, Va. — The costumed characters at George Washington’s gracious estate here are used to handling all manner of awkward queries, whether about 18th-century privies or the first president’s teeth. So when a visitor recently asked an African-American re-enactor in a full skirt and head scarf if she knew Ona Judge, the woman didn’t miss a beat.
Judge’s escape from the presidential residence in Philadelphia in 1796 had been “a great embarrassment to General and Lady Washington,” the woman said, before offering her own view of the matter.“Ona was born free, like everybody,” she said. “It was this world that made her a slave.”
It’s always 1799 at Mount Vernon, where more than a million visitors annually see the property as it was just before Washington’s death, when his will famously freed all 123 of his slaves. That liberation did not apply to Ona Judge, one of 153 slaves held by Martha Washington.
But Judge, it turned out, evaded the Washingtons’ dogged (and sometimes illegal) efforts to recapture her, and would live quietly in New Hampshire for another 50 years. Now her story — and the challenge it offers to the notion that Washington somehow transcended the seamy reality of slaveholding — is having its fullest airing yet.  Judge is among the 19 enslaved people highlighted in “Lives Bound Together: Slavery at George Washington’s Mount Vernon,” the first major exhibition at Mount Vernon dedicated to the topic (it runs through 2018, check link above for details).
She is also the subject of a book, “Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge,” by Erica Armstrong Dunbar.

Erica Armstrong Dunbar, the author of “Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge,” at George Washington’s estate in Mount Vernon, Va. (Credit: Justin T. Gellerson for The New York Times)
Erica Armstrong Dunbar, the author of “Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge,” at George Washington’s estate in Mount Vernon, Va. (Credit: Justin T. Gellerson for The New York Times)

Most scholars who have written about Judge’s escape have used it as a lens onto Washington’s evolving ideas about slavery. But “Never Caught,” published this Tuesday by 37 Ink, flips the perspective, focusing on what freedom meant to the people he kept in bondage. “We have the famous fugitives, like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass,” Ms. Dunbar, a professor of black studies and history at the University of Delaware, said in an interview in Mount Vernon’s 18th-century-style food court. “But decades before them, Ona Judge did this. I want people to know her story.”
Research on slavery has exploded in the two decades since Mount Vernon, Monticello and other founder home sites introduced slavery-themed tours and other prominent acknowledgments of the enslaved. “Lives Bound Together”  was originally going to fill one 1,100-square-foot room in the museum here, but soon expanded to include six other galleries normally dedicated to the decorative and fine arts, books and manuscripts.
An installation about Ona Judge, often referred to by the diminutive Oney, in the exhibition “Lives Bound Together: Slavery at George Washington’s Mount Vernon.” (Justin T. Gellerson for The New York Times)

The exhibition makes it clear just who poured from the elegant teapots and did the backbreaking work on the 8,000-acre estate. But integrating the harsh reality of slavery into the heroic story of Washington — “a leader of character,” as the title of the permanent exhibition across from the slavery show calls him — remains unfinished work, some scholars say.