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Taking Refuge in the Great Dismal Swamp

Great Dismal Swamp
http://www.fws.gov/northeast/greatdismalswamp/

It's tough to imagine the 112,000 muck-filled, bug-swarmed acres of the Great Dismal Swamp looking like paradise. But for enslaved people in the 18th- and 19th-century, the swamp provided protection from those who wished to keep them in bondage.

Host Frank Stasio talks with Dan Sayers, an assistant professor of anthropology at American University, about his research exploring the maroon communities of the swamp, which straddles the Virginia border in the northeast corner of North Carolina; and with Michelle Lanier, acting director of the North Carolina African American Heritage Commission with the state's Historic Sites, about the complex story of the Underground Railroad.

Amber Nimocks came to The State of Things in January 2009. She is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a survivor of 15 years in the newspaper business. As a reporter and editor, her posts have included such exotic locales as her hometown of Fayetteville, Robeson County, Wilmington, Raleigh and Fort Worth, Texas.
Longtime NPR correspondent Frank Stasio was named permanent host of The State of Things in June 2006. A native of Buffalo, Frank has been in radio since the age of 19. He began his public radio career at WOI in Ames, Iowa, where he was a magazine show anchor and the station's News Director.