John P. Parker (1827 – February 4, 1900) was an African-American abolitionist, inventor, iron moulder and industrialist who helped hundreds of slaves to freedom in the Underground Railroad resistance movement based in Ripley, Ohio. He rescued fugitive slaves for nearly fifteen years. He was one of the few blacks to patent his inventions before 1900. His house in Ripley has been designated a National Historic Landmark and restored.
Parker was born in Norfolk, Virginia, the son of a slave mother and white father. Born into slavery, at the age of eight John was forced to walk to Richmond, where he was sold to a doctor from Mobile, Alabama. While working in the doctor's house as a domestic servant, John was taught to read and write by the doctor's family, although the law forbade slaves' being educated. During his apprenticeship in a foundry, John attempted escape and had conflicts with officials. He asked one of the doctor's patients, a widow, to purchase him. She enabled him to hire out to earn money, and he purchased his freedom from her for $1,800 in 1845. He earned the money through his work in two of Mobile's iron foundries and occasional odd jobs.
Parker left the South, first settling in Jeffersonville, Indiana, then Cincinnati, Ohio, where there were a larger free black community and jobs in the bustling port. There in 1848 he married Miranda Boulden, free born in the city. They moved to Ripley, a growing center of abolitionist activity, and had six children together.
In Ripley, Parker joined the resistance movement to aid slaves escaping across the river from Kentucky to get North to freedom via the Underground Railroad. He guided hundreds of slaves, continuing despite a $1,000 bounty placed on his head by slaveholders. The federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 increased the penalties for his activism and meant that he risked his own freedom every time he went to Kentucky to help slaves to escape. During the Civil War, he recruited a few hundred slaves for the Union Army.
Underground Railroad and Civil War
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