Michelle Robbins on Her Underground Railroad Heritage

Audio and video: Alex Allasra, Harriet Tubman Institute, York University 

TRANSCRIPT: 

[Animated Harriet Tubman Institute logo; Inside the Log Cabin, Michelle Robbins is speaking with the research team’s Academic and Archival Consultant, Emilie Andrée Roumer Jabouin, PhD, Research Team Member Gabriela Sealy, and the Curation and Project Lead, Blessing Ogunyemi—who are not visible in the shot. Michelle is responding to Blessing’s question about what it feels like to be a descendant of freedom seekers]. 

Blessing: When you think about it, what does it feel like for you to be a descendant of freedom seekers? 

Michelle: It’s very emotional. And I don’t want to cry because I just, it makes me think, you know, how their resilience got us here. And I will never take that for granted. I will, you know, instill that in my daughter because she needs to know where she came from, too. And for us, we’ve been very fortunate that it’s been passed on generationally from all of us, where we know our history, we know where our family came from. We know, you know, the fight to their freedom.  

So, for us, we feel honored. We will, you know, never take it for granted. We will always continue to share our history. We will preach it until we are blue in the face because we are so proud of our family that came here. And it still stands within this community. Like, there are so many people that are proud descendants of, you know, people that were enslaved and that came here. And for us, sometimes it’s like, what would we do in those circumstances? Would we have that willpower to survive? You know, and now like we have this, this opportunity, and we’re never going to, you know, we’re going to seize every opportunity we have. Because in those times, they didn’t have opportunity to have an education. They didn’t have an opportunity to, you know, learn, have children, have their families with them.  

So, I think when we talk about. . . when I just said we have family birthdays, they didn’t have that. They didn’t have an opportunity to be with their family because they didn’t own themselves. They didn’t own their property; they didn’t own anything. And so now we, you know, have those opportunities to be together all the time. We have family Christmas. I mean, it has like 60-70 people at it because it just keeps growing. But it is that, you know, those circumstances that came before us, we, you know, honor them, and we just, we admire who they were as people and their strength that they had. It’s just …  

Gabriela: It’s beautiful that, I guess, it is growing. But that’s exactly the legacy of, you know, to get bigger and bigger. And that’s like poetic to what they were standing for. 

Michelle: Yeah. And that’s why I would say when I come to work every day, I am proud to see that Buxton sign because I live just outside of Chatham. But I know that this is my home. This is where I grew up. And a lot of people cannot say that they grew up in the land that your family came back from how many generations ago. And you know, it’s an amazing feeling to be a part of that.