This month at the SPOHP, we are highlighting our second interview with Dr. Bruce Purnell in May 2023. Dr. Purnell is a descendant of John Jones, William Whipper Purnell, and others who were involved in abolition and the struggle against slavery in the United States. Dr. Purnell shares his family history and tells us about how the Underground Railroad inspired his current work in community healing and activism. You can watch this interview with Dr. Purnell at tinyurl.com/Iguana1985.
C: My name is Donovan Carter. I’m a researcher with the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, with my friend, Kristen Anderson. We’re both recent graduates from the University of Florida.
A: My name is Krystin Anderson. I’m also a recent graduate of the University of Florida with my bachelor’s in anthropology, and a minor in ethnomusicology. I’ve been researching with SPOHP for the past two years.
C: Thanks so much again, Bruce. This has been super exciting to hear from you. Can you remind the people who you are?
P: I’m a psychologist by trade, founded a community-based organization called The Love More Movement. The mission is to heal from past trauma and move the transformation through a vibration of love. And it’s intergenerational. Our oldest I think is ninety-four. Youngest is like two. So, we believe that we have to heal together. That’s the solution of many of our problems is healing from past trauma. We use the metamorphosis of the caterpillar to the butterfly as our guiding metaphor for the entire piece. If you trust love enough, to enter your cocoon for transformation, then you’re gonna come out flying, you know? Also, we wrote a curriculum for life coaching to kind of break the stigma from mental health. So instead of calling it therapy, we just say transformation. And you becoming a life coach, committing to healing yourself, your family, and your community. We have a cultural movement called the Overground Freeway. Whereas the Underground Railroad was about physical freedom, the Overground Freeway is about mental liberation. So same way we have stations, we try to form stations the same way. My family in Canada, the Shadd family, if I go back to my own genealogy I go back into the Underground Railroad and find my Underground Railroad family. There’s a lot of connections so we have stations put Overground Freeway that way.
C: I really like the terms you use, Overground Freeway for the mental liberation. I remember you mentioned that before and that’s very unique and powerful. Could you talk a little bit more about that and could you start with yourself, maybe your siblings, your parents, and then could you go back?
P: Yeah. My father’s side is connected to the Underground Railroad. My mother’s side goes to North Carolina, and my father is Washington, D.C. up to Canada. So, my father’s father was Lee Julian Purnell, retired Dean of Engineering at Howard University. And his father was William Whipper Purnell, who was a surgeon. He married Theodora Lee, which was John Jones from Chicago, his granddaughter. William Whipper Purnell’s parents were James Whipper Purnell, who was Secretary [to Martin R.] Delaney in the Back-to-Africa movement. And also, he was at John Brown’s convention in Chatham, Canada. They were together and kind of organizing that piece. And James Whipper Purnell married Julia Shadd. Him and Julia — were cousins with — Mary Ann actually lived with them on the time. Her mother’s father was Absalom Shadd who had a restaurant in DC but during Nat Turner’s [Slave] Rebellion, he couldn’t even sit at his own counter, the restaurant that he owned. So, he moved back to Chatham and got a farm right next to Abraham Shadd, which was Mary Ann Shad’s father. So, him and Osborne Anderson and Absalom Shadd ran the farm in Chatham.
That’s where they had the John Brown meetings. And as you know Osborne Anderson was the only one that escaped the Harper’s Ferry raid, [except] John Brown. He’s the one told the story about what happened. So, James Whipper Purnell was kind of raised by William Whipper, who was a Underground Railroad station master in Philadelphia. And even though he was his nephew, he was raised as his son and they had a lumber yard and they actually had a real railroad. Steven Smith had box cars that were empty and they were moving enslaved people or freedom seekers across with the railroad. And they were the first, not founders, but co-founders of the Dawn Settlement in Southern Ontario. That’s where Uncle Tom’s cabin was. And they had a community that was the real Uncle Tom’s Cabin. They had businesses, he had a hotel, like cleaners and different businesses and stuff.
But it was a thriving community going in Dresden. It was Dresden, Chatham, and then Buxton where we had a reunion every year. We had the Buxton reunion every Labor Day. Then like I said William Whipper Purnell married Theodora Lee, John Jones’s granddaughter. So, John and Mary Jones were station masters also in Chicago. And their daughter was Lavinia. Lavinia Jones married Theodore Lee. And Theodore Lee was the grandson of William Billy Lee, who was enslaved by George Washington. And he was the only one that got his freedom when George Washington died. He was his valet almost. He rode in the American Revolution with him, fox hunts and all of that stuff, but was invisible. Was invisible because he was Black basically. But, he’s in a couple of pictures now, and then if you go to Mount Vernon, you’ll see oh, William Billy Lee, [in] this piece. His grandson married Lavinia and they had one daughter, which was Theodora Lee who became Theodora Lee Purnell when she married William Whipper Purnell.
C: That’s quite something. You mentioned it before, how it spans like from the DC Eastern shore area all the way up to Canada. So, where you went to your family reunions during Labor Day, where were those?
P: So, every Labor Day, the Buxton reunions is Buxton, Ontario and Ryan Prince who has quite a few books about the Underground Railroad and the Canada history is the steward of that space, a cousin, but that’s just the Shadd side. But Buxton, Chatham, Chatham was where John Brown had the meetings, when they came and they really planned the Harpers Ferry Raid and stuff, that happened in Chatham, and Buxton and Chatham maybe fifteen minutes away. But both Absalom Shadd and Abraham Shadd, Mary Ann Shadd’s father, they had farms next to each other. They were brothers and you know, the Shadds they had so, Hans Shadd who came, he was a mercenary from Germany. And he got wounded. They were actually fighting the French. He was being paid by the British then. And he got wounded and you know, then Elizabeth brought ‘em in, and they actually couldn’t get married, but they were really a couple. So they had two children, Hans and Jeremiah. Hans, he went to Florida and we haven’t seen him. I guess he lived as a White man in Florida. And Jeremiah had like twelve children and maybe fifteen. And that was all the Shadd’s and almost everybody connected to like an Underground Railroad. That was 1790s, 1780s in Delaware.
C: That’s incredible, any questions Krystin?
A: Yeah, that’s a lot of connections. Family is intertwined with history in so many ways. So, in your life, how did you learn these stories about all of your family and your connections? Did you hear these stories growing up or how did this work?
P: My father used to talk about John Jones and the fact that, you know, he had to ride. So, when he was indentured, basically he was born free to protect him from being enslaved—this is in Tennessee. But when the person he was indentured to, when he died, the siblings tried to enslave him, said that was not, that was never the case. He was their slave. So, he rode after the night to North Carolina to get his freedom papers, and he came back and they had trial and stuff. My father used to talk about that, “Oh yeah, you ride, like John Jones in the middle of the night.” So, we hear the stories and stuff. I didn’t know what it meant, right. And really until later on.
It even saved my life truthfully because, you know, all the things going on, that’s probably what pulled me out of it. I mean like you almost had to be a part of some cruel game. Like, so having that ‘why’, as to why I’m not participating in this, cause you know, that was the narrative that was going, if you wasn’t hustling, you wasn’t nobody at a certain point. I gotta have, accountability to something else. And I think that, you know, as I started to learn more. It’s like, wow, this thing was about liberation, it wasn’t about chasing paper money, it was about freedom. I felt like we’ve been misdirected to something else. Like, you know, the pursuit of something else that made no sense. And being socialized to be a consumer.
So, I started to think about that too, like, what is it you want from me? Oh you want me to be a consumer? I have to try to buy love through this process. And I’m never going to get it, but I’m always gonna be searching for it. If I don’t have any money to buy, then I’m nobody. So, you know, even dealing with that piece, like that’s the other side of it. And going back I’m like, “wow,” like, you know my ancestors have been through too much for me to just give this up for this. Like, it doesn’t even make sense. So, I didn’t mind being the weird one at that point.
C: What kind of other things did you hear? Did you also hear about your Shadd connections in your home? Did you hear about the Lee’s and Purnell’s in the same way or …?
P: I started to ask questions. Like, my father started to really just tell me because you know, what was going on. He didn’t talk about it too much until I started to ask. We had some deep conversations about it. The more I asked, the more he gave me. And one day he just gave me a duffle bag. It was just full of pictures, like in letters. I got letters from Frederick Douglass to John Jones, like, handwritten letters and different things. He’s like “You’re gonna be the one that cares about this. You’re gonna be the one that you know makes sure that your future generations know their story and who they are and what they meant.”
One time we traveled to Chicago, the Masonic Lodge. I think it is John Jones’ Number Seven. And that’s probably why I became a Mason. From the time all the way to my fifth great great-grandfather, they all were [Masons] so, it kind of led my journey. Even what I’m doing now, the Overground Freeway. That’s the whole purpose. The purpose is still, “Look everybody gets to experience liberation and unless all of us are free, none of us are free.” So having that kind of mentality, it comes from there.
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