VOICES: Dr. Richard Bell

Dr. Richard Bell is a professor of history at the University of Maryland, College Park. Bell’s most recent book, Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home, is a gripping and true story. Their ordeal—an odyssey that took them from the Philadelphia waterfront to the marshes of Mississippi and beyond—shines a glaring spotlight on the Reverse Underground Railroad, a black-market network of human traffickers and slave traders who stole away thousands of legally free African Americans from their families in order to fuel slavery’s rapid expansion in the decades before the Civil War.

VOICES, the Redeemer Speaker Series invites contemporary voices to challenge and inform us: artists and authors, visionaries and thought leaders, advocates of change courageous enough to hold the loveliness and sorrow of the world at once, and find the wonder in both.