Via BLACK ANTI-SLAVERY ACTIVITY. African American leaders were active in white societies from the beginning. Pronounced men such as Henry Bibb and William Wells Brown, both escapees from Kentucky, and Frederick Douglass, who had fled enslavement in Maryland, “the best qualified to address the public on the subject of slavery.” Between 1810 and 1850, tens of thousands of southern slaves ran away and fled north. A few intrepid refugees returned to the slave states to organize more escapes. Fearless Harriet Tubman, the most celebrated runaway, risked everything to venture back to the South nineteen times and helped three hundred slaves escape. Sojourner Truth crisscrossing the country during the 1840s and 1850s, exhorting audiences to support women’s rights and the immediate abolition of slavery.