Mary Walker faced an impossible choice in the 1850’s: Her children or her freedom?
Walker, born into slavery in Durham, had a rare opportunity to flee when the Cameron family, her enslavers, took her on a visit to Philadelphia. But if she tried to live as a free woman in Philadelphia, she would likely never again see her mother and three kids who she left behind on the plantation now known as Stagville in northern Durham County.
Walker fled.
“She spent the following years of her life hoping and praying and working to figure out how she could get her family free,” Vera Cecelski, site manager of Historic Stagville, tells a tour group of about 40 people on a sunny Juneteenth…