Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave

Dunbar concerns herself with rectifying the legacy of slavery and racism inherent in the American social tapestry. In Never Caught, she uses meticulous research and scholarship to popularize history through the lens of Black experience—an undertaking of which America needs more. Her telling of Judge’s story as intertwined with that of the Washingtons shows that American history is not Black history and white history as separate entities. Rather, polarization of Black and white experiences in history “narrow[s] the debate toward one of inclusion or exclusion [… and] tends to prohibit the interpretive practice that is at the core of historical thinking” (Sotiropoulos, Karen. “Teaching Black History after Obama” Social Studies. Jul/Aug 2017, Vol. 108 Issue 4, pp. 121-28). Dunbar exemplifies that without a wholistic historical picture, American history is left white history, where “contributions” of African-Americans are inserted but not fully participatory. Dunbar’s use of primary documents to reveal Judge’s experience in visceral detail illustrates:

Historians of the black past continue to have a most important role in steering America to a new way to inhabit the dungeon side of its past; they can help ‘blacks and everyone in this country develop a common understanding of the important role that the black struggle for human rights has played through the years not only to advance blacks but also to humanize this country’ (Boggs, G.