Objectives & Ethics

Racialized policing and Black self-liberation are key themes in American history, and the advertisements in our database demonstrate both.

Between 1706 and 1865, enslavers placed hundreds of thousands of newspaper ads describing African and African-American people who were attempting to free themselves from slavery. Some ads were placed by enslavers seeking to enlist other Americans to recapture self-liberators, or by jailers who wanted to inform enslavers that someone had been recaptured and was being held in a local lockup. We estimate that over 200,000 ads survive. We are trying to collect and make all of them available.

This is an archive of Black resistance.

While some people may view this project as historical “big data” that could be abstracted, we understand our work as an effort to preserve and share the stories of thousands of freedom-seekers and freedom-makers.

Enslavers may have authored these records, but it was the actions of individual self-liberators that wrought these documents into existence. In effect, by writing these ads, enslavers were admitting something they were loathed to acknowledge: that their power was incomplete.

Enslaved African and African Americans deserve to be remembered by name.

In most cases, these ads are the only surviving record of those specific people. They lived and often died in conditions that they did not choose. But they risked everything to reshape those conditions and make themselves more free.  There are few pre-1865 US sources that show us even the most basic demographic, relational, and descriptive detail about individual African-descended people. The ads form probably the largest set of such sources.

Records of enslaved African and African Americans’ lives do not belong behind paywalls.

The Freedom on the Move database is available for free — to use online, or to download, in part or whole. We only ask that users follow the terms of our specific Creative Commons license level. This asks people who use or publish the data to acknowledge both the original source, and Freedom on the Move.