A historian is marking America's 250th birthday by walking the exact route enslaved people used to escape it. Anthony Cohen, 62, is making a 750-mile journey from Sandy Spring, Maryland to Toronto, Canada — and he's timed his arrival for July 4th. Whether that's optimistic or the darkest joke in American history is genuinely hard to say.
The Route, the Reason, and the Very Pointed Timing
Cohen isn't doing this on a whim. As CBS News reports, he first walked an Underground Railroad route back in 1996, traveling from Maryland all the way to Ontario. He's spent the decades since founding the Menare Foundation, an organization that builds immersive, history-based experiences designed to teach people about the Underground Railroad and the people who risked everything to travel it.
For the 250th anniversary of a country that was built, in no small part, on the labor of people who had no legal right to walk freely anywhere within its borders, Cohen decided to do it again. A different route this time, from Sandy Spring, Maryland through Delaware, New Jersey, and New York, then up into Canada. He used historical maps and first-person accounts to trace the path. He calls it the Freedom Walk.
He is scheduled to cross into Canada on July 1st and arrive in Toronto on July 4th. Independence Day. The 250th. You can sit with that for a second.
One Foot in Front of the Other
The journey has not been a solo endeavor. The Menare Foundation published Cohen's itinerary in advance, letting people show up along the way to hear him speak and learn about the history he's literally walking through. According to CBS News, a Harriet Tubman Journey to Freedom statue has been traveling with the group the entire time.
Most of the trip has been on foot, though Cohen has used other forms of transportation when the route allows, including a train through upstate New York that closely follows the historic corridor. That's not a concession. That's historically accurate. The Underground Railroad wasn't just about walking. It was about using every available resource, every sympathetic hand, every mode of movement that could get a person one mile further north.
"Any freedom movement is about putting one foot in front of the other and going for it," Cohen told CBS News. Which is, pound for pound, one of the more quietly devastating sentences you'll read this week.
The Slave Trader's Descendant Who Showed Up Anyway
Here is where the story takes a turn that is either deeply hopeful or deeply complicated, possibly both. Cohen invited Tom DeWolf to join him on the walk. DeWolf's family, according to CBS News, was once the largest slave-trading family in the United States. That is not a typo. The largest.
DeWolf's own reaction when Cohen called him was, understandably, uncertain. "I said, 'But I'm a White guy,'" DeWolf told CBS News. Cohen's response was direct: White people helped on the Underground Railroad. And then he told DeWolf he could write a new legacy for his family.
So DeWolf is walking too. At stops along the route, the two of them speak together about the history of the slave trade, the Underground Railroad, and what they're doing and why. A historian whose ancestors were enslaved, and a man whose ancestors did the enslaving, walking the same road north together. Make of that what you will. There's a lot to make of it.
What 250 Years Actually Looks Like
The official America250 celebrations have been, to put it charitably, a lot of flag imagery and fireworks announcements and self-congratulatory rhetoric about freedom and founding and greatness. There are parades being planned. There are speeches being written. There is a great deal of bunting.
And then there is Anthony Cohen, 62 years old, walking 750 miles through the humid summer heat along a path that formerly free people traced in secret, at night, in terror, hoping not to be caught and dragged back to bondage. He's not doing it to be a downer. He's doing it because this is also America's history, and it is just as real and just as foundational as anything being celebrated with fireworks over a river somewhere.
The country turns 250 on July 4th. Cohen will be in Toronto.
The Dingo Take
There is something almost unbearably pointed about the fact that the most powerful statement being made about America's 250th anniversary is a man walking to Canada on the route people used to escape America. Cohen isn't calling the country irredeemable. He isn't saying freedom was a lie. He's saying freedom was complicated and incomplete and hard-won and ongoing, and that the people who ran the Underground Railroad understood more about what freedom actually costs than most of the people writing the speeches this week ever will.
The detail that gets you, if you let it, is the timing. July 4th. Toronto. Cohen didn't have to do that. He could have arrived on the 3rd or the 6th. He chose July 4th. That's not an accident. That's a historian making an argument without saying a word, and it's a more coherent argument about American history than anything you're going to hear from a podium at any official celebration happening that same day.
Walk 750 miles, arrive in Canada on Independence Day, bring the descendant of the country's largest slave-trading family with you. If you can think of a more compressed, more honest summary of what this country is and has been and is still trying to figure out how to be, go ahead. We're listening.
