Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz Author Talk
About this Event
Huxley & Hiro Booksellers and The Delaware Historical Society welcome Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz for an author talk at the Delaware History Museum and Center for African American Heritage. Cristin will speak on her new book The Ballad of the Fugitive William Parker: A True Tale of Love, M**der, Treason, and Ordinary Folks Who Saved America.
Sunday September 13, 2-4pm.
Free event. Registration Required.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The History
On the morning of September 11, 1851, fugitive slave turned community leader William Parker stood his ground at his farmhouse door in Christiana, Pennsylvania, as a Maryland enslaver named Edward Gorsuch arrived with a federal marshal and an armed posse to reclaim four men who had escaped his plantation. What happened next became a national fixation: as Parker refused to relinquish the men to Gorusch or the U.S. Marshall he hired who came with warrants in hand, his wife blew a tin horn out their attic window—a signal to the local community to come running.
Soon, the small farm was overrun with Black men and women, simple farmers carrying farm tools as weapons, determined to stop Gorsuch’s plans. Two local white men also appeared—one Quaker on foot, one miller on horseback—and when they too refused to help, despite the recently passed Fugitive Slave Act demanding that they should, the standoff spun into chaos. By the end of the morning, Gorsuch was dead and the rest of his posse injured or on the run. By the next day, dozens of local men, Black and white, were arrested, and with the eyes of the country on them, charged with Treason in a trial that would captivate a nation.
Newspapers at the time ran the headlines like Civil War — The First Blow Struck. The president himself advised the prosecution, while Thaddeus Stevens brought his brash wit to the defense. Sixty years later, The New York Times was still describing it as “really the first bloodshed of the civil war.” And then, somehow, the story nearly disappeared from American memory.
The Book and Its Moment
The Ballad of the Fugitive William Parker is the first narrative nonfiction account of the Christiana Resistance, and the first to unite the three of the radical abolitionist communities that made it possible: the wealthy free Black elite of Philadelphia, the rural white Quakers of Pennsylvania, and the fugitives from slavery who lived, worked, and ultimately fought in both worlds.
The historiography of the Christiana Resistance has evolved significantly. Early accounts focused largely on the white participants — the lawyers, the judges, the enslaver who came north seeking his “property.” Jonathan Ned Katz’s landmark 1974 book Resistance at Christiana began the crucial work of centering William Parker and the Black participants. The most recent book on the event, 1998’s But We Have No Country by Dr Ella Forces, deepened that lens, offering the most in-depth portrait of Black life and agency in Christiana yet published.
Cristin’s book is the next step in that arc: the first account to show how the impact and influence of Philadelphia’s wealthy Black elite on both the buildup and aftermath of the standoff—including the trail itself, held at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall.
Philadelphia abolitionists, rural white Quakers, and the fugitive community with existed in both worlds operated as a unified force — sharing intelligence, providing legal strategy, and staging moments of deliberate, radical spectacle. Among them: building up the legend of William Parker, a man who it was rumored bullets could not K*ll; and working together to outfit the Black prisoners in identical suits with patriotic scarves and marching them into court alongside a white Quaker woman, a tableau designed to unsettle the jury and the nation.
The Ballad of the Fugitive William Parker tells the story of what happened outside William Parker’s house in the dawn hours of September 11, 1851. But it also tells a much larger story involving decades of tenacious, ever-evolving anti-slavery and civil rights efforts by communities spread out across Philadelphia and rural southeastern Pennsylvania, communities divided by class and race but connected in spirited defiance of laws they knew to be unjust and inhumane.
These men and women weren’t perfect: mistakes were made, people were hurt, and long-fought-for progress was stymied—or worse, rolled back. And yet, despite their differences—in what they were risking, and what they themselves felt reasonable—when it was important, they had each other’s backs. It is a story of community, of hard work, and of faith kept alive until beliefs most of their era would consider radical could one day become the rights an entire world would come to see as American.
Hanif Abdurraqib has written of the book: “I left this book thinking about how incredible it is to have a story of community-based resistance, at any time, but specifically at this time.”
The Anniversary and the Timing
September 11, 2026 is the 175th anniversary of the Christiana Resistance. The community of Christiana, Pennsylvania will hold its annual Heritage Days celebration — a multi-day gathering organized by the Christiana Historical Society that extends a remarkable welcome not only to descendants of those who resisted, but to descendants of the enslaver’s family as well, modeling a practice of honest, inclusive historical reckoning that is rare and worth naming.
A Personal Note from CristinMy connection to the Christiana Resistance began with a discovery I wasn’t looking for.I was researching my late mother’s family, which I’d always been told were all Irish Catholic immigrants who fled to Philadelphia during their escape from famine. Irish immigrants having a mixed reputation when it came to fighting for equality for all, so I braced myself to find ancestors on the wrong side of history, but instead I found Mary Price.Mary Price was my mother’s mother’s mother, and her family, as it turned out, was old American: Quakers, Mennonites, and Dunkers, going back to the early 1700s. I kept digging and found my family in R.C. Smedley’s 1883 history of the Underground Railroad in Chester County, listed among the network: the descendants of John Price, a Dunkard minister, who sewed clothes for freedom seekers, burned the coarse Southern fabric that would betray them, and helped men, women, and children find freedom.And it was in same book was also where I first encountered the phrase “the Christiana Riot.”I lived in New York City for a decade and a half (1996-2010), and I found the book’s frequent and casual use of the phrase “the Christiana Riot” to feel so familiar. It reminded me how we New Yorkers used “9/11” in conversation — not needing much additional explanation, delineating a clear before-and-after, an event that everyone understood as being world-shaking, both locally and nationally. It was clear this “Christiana Riot” (later to be renamed the “Christiana Resistance”) was this community’s 9/11. And yet I had never heard of it: why? What was this “riot,” and why was it erased from public memory?That was the beginning of my book.The Christiana Resistance is a story about ordinary Americans — Black and white, free and fugitive, wealthy and working class — who saw injustice where it stood, and refused to bow to it, and how that changed the country for the better.With deep respect and gratitude,Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz
Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz is also featured at the History Book Festival in Lewes on Saturday September 26.
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