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How a Minnesota barber worked to free slaves before the Civil War
Dickson used four jobs to move messages and help send thousands of enslaved people north through the Underground Railroad, newspapers reported.
- Historian Karen Sieber, who leads the Finding Moses Initiative at Southern New Hampshire University, recently uncovered Moses Dickson's previously unknown 1850s activities in Minnesota organizing the Underground Railroad.
- Working as a barber in Seven Corners and as an educator in St. Paul, Dickson used these roles as cover to organize the Knights of Liberty and pass messages for the Underground Railroad.
- Dickson orchestrated escapes by disguising freedom seekers as young men on Mississippi River steamboats, telling the Minneapolis Journal, "I went down to the levee with a good-looking young man and a boy."
- Following the 1857 Dred Scott decision declaring enslaved people property, Dickson left Minnesota and wrote a letter to the Minnesota Weekly Times, signing it "an alien American."
- By 1896, Dickson's organization, the International Order of Twelve Knights and Daughters of Tabor, grew to 301,750 members, and he continued work as an African Methodist Episcopal preacher.
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How a Minnesota barber worked to free slaves before the Civil War
ST. PAUL, Minn. — Working as a barber inside bustling Seven Corners was the perfect cover for Moses Dickson in 1856. From behind the scissors in St. Paul and on steamboats traveling the nearby Mississippi River, he listened, developed contacts, organized and passed messages to deeply embedded members of the Underground Railroad as well as the 11 founding members of a secret society he founded called the Knights of Liberty, not to be confused wit…
·Cherokee County, United States
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Total News Sources14
Leaning Left0Leaning Right8Center5Last UpdatedBias Distribution62% Right
Bias Distribution
- 62% of the sources lean Right
62% Right
C 38%
R 62%
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