Being a teacher in the United States requires an in-depth understanding of how to teach young minds in the classroom. The state sets academic standards that each teacher is required to teach their students. Creating a classroom full of words such as analyze, evaluate, understand, explain, and compare/ contrast. The goal is to develop thinkers who can synthesize information to form a complete picture of a topic.

Social studies and history classrooms are designed to help students understand people, places, and events to explain the present. At their best, these disciplines encourage learners to investigate historical events, analyze primary and secondary sources, understand real-world issues, and synthesize multiple human perspectives. But too often, the perspectives emphasized are limited to those who “had the pencil”—the individuals and institutions with the authority to write, publish, and preserve history.

When history is told primarily from a single vantage point, entire narratives of resistance, strategy, and self-determination are left incomplete. Yet rarely are we asked to interrogate a more fundamental question: Who decided which stories were worth recording and which to discard? More importantly, whose stories remain unfinished not because they lacked meaning, but because they lacked power.

Historical forces shape every person’s life: where they live, who governs them, and how resources are distributed. Communities pass stories down the same way they pass down traditions through repetition, memory, and shared meaning. Some of these stories become embedded in culture, such as that amazing catch at the local sporting event. The tale can grow bigger and more glamorous over time. Just as a viral video makes its way into our social media feeds, communities have stories that attract followers who share the tale in their feeds for others to read. Other stories are negated of their meaning and are dismissed, distorted, or deliberately erased.

However, many stories remain unshared. Or if they were shared, believability was dismissed, and the antithesis of the story was uplifted. The result is not an absence of history, but a curated version that privileges power over truth.  There are people whose stories are forgotten or were never told in the first place.

One of the most enduring unwritten stories in the United States is the story of enslavement as told almost exclusively through the voices of enslavers, government records, and institutional archives. For generations, textbooks and curricula have centered these dominant perspectives, reinforcing a narrative in which enslaved people appear primarily as passive victims rather than as thinkers, planners, and agents of their own liberation. The person who held the pencil also held the power to define resistance and often chose not to name it. This is the history that has been taught for generations, shared from one perspective and never from the person who had no voice.

Yet resistance did not only occur in moments of rebellion or escape. It lived in strategy, in literacy, in family preservation, in spiritual life, and in the constant calculation of survival. Resistance was intellectual, emotional, and deeply organized. Recognizing this requires not only learning new facts but also unlearning the language and frameworks that have shaped how we read the past.

Dedicated to reframing the language of enslavement, the National Park Service, operators of Frederick Douglass’s homestead in Washington DC, models how reframing language can shift interpretation, which moves us closer to historical truth rather than inherited bias. When we talk about enslavement, we often use the words that were passed down to us from generations ago. Words such as slavery, runaway slave, and plantation owner were commonly used in textbooks. When reframing words, the common term of slavery becomes enslaved. Enslaved notes that something happened to someone, and is not a descriptor of a person’s identity. 

This is where the power of language becomes central, not secondary. Terms like “runaway slave,” long normalized in educational spaces, frame freedom as theft and movement as crime. In contrast, asset-based language, such as self-liberated or freedom seeker, restores agency and intention. A freedom seeker is not defined by what they fled, but by what they pursued. They were on the path toward writing their own story. To self-liberate is to claim one’s humanity in a system designed to deny it.

Freedom on the Move is a comprehensive database of advertisements that detail enslaved people who self-liberated toward freedom. It offers the opportunity to hear a story of resistance among enslaved people in the United States.

The term freedom seeker is an asset-based term that encapsulates the bold spirit of these individuals. It shows the power of the agency to resist, to be bold, and do what no one thought they could do – give themselves freedom in a time of perilous danger.

What once appeared as notices of loss become records of resolve. Each description of skills, routes, and relationships reveals planning and collective knowledge. These documents testify that freedom was not accidental or rare; it was imagined, pursued, and organized. The unfinished story is not whether enslaved people resisted, but why that resistance was so often minimized or misnamed.

When the advertisements in Freedom on the Move are read with awareness, they transform. Combining the advertisements with the knowledge gained surrounding reframing language, you can feel the heroic journey the freedom seekers were running toward. Created initially to control movement and reinforce ownership, these documents now serve a different purpose. Read through a reframed lens, they preserve evidence of courage, ingenuity, and planning. They tell unfinished stories, not as the enslavers intended, but as the freedom seekers lived them.

This is evident in the advertisement for Freedom Seeker Anthony, who displays determination and resourcefulness. Reading this article sheds light on the freedom that Anthony gained by utilizing a neighborhood horse. Another story is shared of Louise, who spoke three languages. She took her “very pleasant countenance” and left the place where she was enslaved to create a new life. Louise spoke French, English, and Spanish and served as an asset in her self-liberation. Although their stories are rarely told, each had the courage to leave and write their own endings. Both freedom seekers were taking control of their lives and destiny. That type of bravery lives within generations – it is unstoppable.

These are not unfinished stories; they live on through generations of bravery and resistance. They are living narratives that continue to be written into the future.

References

Freedom on the Move Project. “Freedom on the Move | Cornell University.” Freedom on the Move, freedomonthemove.org/.

National Park Service. “Language of Enslavement – Frederick Douglass National Historic Site (U.S. National Park Service).” Www.nps.gov, 2 July 2022, http://www.nps.gov/frdo/learn/education/language-of-enslavement.htm.