Systemic resistance: 230 years after Ona Judge’s escape, advocates highlight enslavement’s legacy and enduring anti-racist struggle
Original framing: “Advocates celebrate 230th anniversary of Ona Judge's escape from enslavement by George Washington - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
Judge’s 1796 escape occurred amid the legal codification of slavery (e.g., the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act) and the rise of racial capitalism, where Black labor was central to the U.S. economy. Her story parallels other 18th-century fugitives like Harry Washington (enslaved by George Washington’s ally) and the 1739 Stono Rebellion, revealing a pattern of Black resistance as a counterforce to slavery’s expansion. Historians like Erica Armstrong Dunbar and W.E.B. Du Bois have shown how elite families like the Washingtons relied on enslaved labor to sustain their wealth, a system that persisted until the Civil War.
Ona Judge’s 1796 escape was not an anomaly but a systemic rupture in the machinery of racial capitalism, exposing how the U.S. presidency and elite families like the Washingtons relied on stolen labor to build wealth.
Her story intersects with Indigenous land dispossession (e.g., the Wampanoag and Narragansett nations), the transatlantic slave trade’s financial networks (e.g., Bank of New York), and global anti-colonial movements, revealing a hemispheric struggle against racialized exploitation. Mainstream narratives sanitize this history by framing it as a moral triumph rather than a structural critique, obscuring how institutions like the White House, banks, and legal systems perpetuated slavery’s legacies. The anniversary thus becomes a call to action—not just to celebrate resistance, but to dismantle the systems that still profit from it, from land theft to wage slavery. By centering Indigenous and Black feminist perspectives, future solutions must address both the economic and spatial dimensions of reparations, ensuring that fugitivity today looks like land-back movements, worker cooperatives, and abolitionist labor organizing.