Positive News: Something Positive: BHM 100: Ona “Oney” Judge – the Enslaved Woman Who Emancipated Herself as George Washington Ate Dinner

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Photo for the article BHM 100: Ona “Oney” Judge – the Enslaved Woman Who Emancipated Herself as George Washington Ate Dinner

by Lori Lakin Hutcherson, GBN Editor-in-Chief

On Presidents Day, we are honoring someone who was all too familiar with the United States’ first president George Washington — her name was Ona “Oney” Judge.

Judge knew there was no time like dinnertime to make her escape. Enslaved by President George Washington and his wife, Martha, in 1796 Judge secretly booked passage on a boat and left the nation’s then capital, Philadelphia, as the Washingtons ate their supper, determined not to return to their plantation in Mount Vernon and remain enslaved.

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Judge hid in Portsmouth, New Hampshire (by then a free state). As president of a nation that just attained its freedom from the British, Washington knew he might face serious criticism and scrutiny if he used a slave catcher to recapture Judge. Instead, he used advertisements and sent emissaries after her three times, but Judge refused to return.

Though she technically was still a fugitive when Washington died in 1799, she was finally left alone, free and remained “never caught.” On February 25, 2008, Philadelphia celebrated the first “Oney Judge Day” at the President’s House site.

To learn more about Judge, read the 2018 book Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge by Erica Armstrong Dunbar or the 2020 children’s book Never Caught, the Story of Ona Judge: George and Martha Washington’s Courageous Slave Who Dared to Run Away; Young Readers Edition, also by Erica Armstrong Dunbar, you can watch the Mount Vernon video on Ona Judge.

Sources:

https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/ona-judge-escapes/
https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/ona-judge/
https://www.beyondthebelltours.com/blog/badass-women-of-philadelphia-ona-judge
https://www.nps.gov/articles/independence-oneyjudge.htm
https://www.whitehousehistory.org/the-remarkable-story-of-ona-judge
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/06/arts/george-washington-mount-vernon-slavery.html?_r=0