Ellen Craft

Born into slavery in Georgia around 1826, she became famous with her husband, William Craft, for an extraordinary escape in 1848. To travel safely through the South, she disguised herself as a young white man while he posed as her enslaved attendant, and together they made their way to freedom.

After reaching the North, the Crafts became active in the abolitionist movement. They later spent years in Britain after the Fugitive Slave Act made life in the United States even more dangerous for people who had escaped slavery. Their story was preserved most famously in William and Ellen Craft’s memoir, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom.

In the years after the Civil War, the Crafts returned to Georgia, where they worked to build educational opportunities for formerly enslaved people. Her legacy endures as one of the clearest and most powerful examples of bravery, strategy, and resistance in the history of American slavery.