Sometimes, a piece of writing resonates with everything you’ve been working on and helps you to think about that work in a new and exciting way. That was my experience reading bell hooks’s essay, “Homeplace (a site of resistance)” late in the stages of writing my upcoming biography of Jermain Wesley Loguen, soon to be published in the Black Lives series of Yale University Press.[1]

Loguen was a fugitive from slavery, a conductor on the Underground Railroad, a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and a man who defied the Fugitive Slave Law with unwavering conviction. His home in Syracuse, New York, became one of the central hubs of the Underground Railroad in the 1850s, and as the Loguen family opened their home to fugitives from slavery, they did more than provide shelter. They made a political statement against the injustice of American laws that supported slavery. The centrality of the idea of home as a refuge was a theme that I highlighted in the biography, and its political power was something that I decided to focus upon when I was invited to contribute to the special issue on alternative forms of political action for the Journal of the Early Republic. In “Politicizing the Home: The Loguen Family’s Underground Railroad,” I sought to expand on the way in which the Loguens’ defiance of an unjust law made their home into a political space.

Image of Jermain Wesley Loguen from his 1859 autobiography. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

As I was finalizing the article, I came across hooks’s meditation on the domestic spaces created by the Black women in her own family and community in the midst of the twentieth-century struggle against racial oppression and segregation. In a world in which Black humanity was often denied, she saw the creation of such spaces as an important, yet hidden, element of resistance. “Historically, African-American people believed that the construction of a homeplace. . . had a radical political dimension,” she argued, “Despite the brutal reality of racial apartheid, of domination, one’s homeplace was the one site where one could freely confront the issue of humanization, where one could resist.” Black women performed such resistance by nurturing households “where all black people could strive to be subjects, not objects.”[2]

As I read her elaboration of the concept of “homeplace” as a refuge created by Black women to nurture dignity, safety, and resistance, I recognized its application to understanding women’s invisible labor as they opened their homes to fugitives from slavery in the nineteenth century. hooks’s own argument that Black women’s creation of a “homeplace” transformed domestic work into a political act was something that I recognized in my conception of how Loguen’s home became a political space. The Loguen household served not only as a site where laws deemed immoral were consistently broken and where fellow fugitives could find safety, but also as a space where everyday acts of care became acts of resistance. And playing no small part in transforming his home into a place of refuge for freedom seekers were the efforts of Loguen’s wife Caroline and of his children, including his oldest daughters Sarah, Amelia, and Letitia. The home was a place in which the Loguen women provided domestic care and the Loguen children learned both about service and resistance. It was a place where all members of the family empowered fugitives to “be subjects, not objects.”

The Underground Railroad is often remembered for its daring escapes and secret routes, but we must not overlook the fact that it was also deeply rooted in domestic spaces. It relied on homes like that of the Loguens to function. In such homes, women’s work became political as they made the private public, turning kitchens and parlors into battlegrounds for justice. The Loguen family’s creation of a “homeplace” for fugitives reminds us that resistance doesn’t always look like protest marches, fiery speeches, or rescues of those unfairly detained. Sometimes it looks like setting a table, offering a bed, nursing a wound, or comforting a child. It is rooted in the simple refusal to let unjust laws dictate how you treat your fellow human beings.

This kind of resistance is especially relevant today. In a time when many feel powerless in the face of political polarization and systemic injustice, the work of the Loguen family and hooks’s idea of “homeplace” together offer a model for persistence. During the antislavery struggle of the antebellum period as well as throughout the twentieth-century fight for civil rights, African Americans faced what seemed like insurmountable odds in their hopes for political change and social justice. Still, they resisted. One of the ways they did so was in their creation of homeplaces that nurtured the dignity of others who were denied it elsewhere.  Today, many feel a sense of helplessness when faced with a system that seems to be stacked against justice. But we should remember that although we cannot control the actions of the Supreme Court, the legislature, or the executive branch, we do have control over what happens in our homes. We can raise our children to value justice. We can support our neighbors in need, and we can refuse to let cruelty define our communities.

In her essay, hooks pointed out that the “the task of making of homeplace, of making home a community of resistance” was an important but overlooked type of politics undertaken by Black women during the twentieth-century struggle for civil rights.[3] The Loguen home was such a place a hundred years prior. It was a site of resistance not just because those within it defied the law, but because they affirmed the humanity of those the law failed to protect. In remembering the domestic labor of members of the Loguen family as they aided fugitives, we honor bell hooks’s idea of “homeplace” and recognize also that the way we live our everyday lives can be a powerful form of political dissent.

Endnotes

[1] bell hooks, “Homeplace (a site of resistance)” in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston, 1990), 42–44; Angela F. Murphy, Jermain Wesley Loguen: Defiant Fugitive (New Haven, CT, 2025).

[2] hooks, “Homeplace,” 42.

[3] hooks, “Homeplace,” 42.