Lord Baltimore Fellow Virtual Lecture—Experience, Adventures, and Escape of Richard J. Potter: Free Black Apprenticeships in Antebellum Maryland

At eleven years old, Richard J. Potter, a free Black apprentice, was kidnapped to Delaware, but later managed to escape. Potter’s story illuminates the unstable and fragile legal status of freedom for Black children, especially those under apprenticeships, in antebellum Maryland. In this virtual lecture, Youngin Jang, 2024–2025 Lord Baltimore Fellow, explores how the apprenticeship system was racialized, threatening the status of free Black Marylanders, and the resistance efforts that free Black families had to undertake.

Image: Twenty-eight fugitives escaping from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, print by John Osler, an illustration from William Still’s 1872 publication The Underground Railroad, ca. 1872. Maryland Center for History and Culture, H. Furlong Baldwin Library, Rare Book Collection.