Lunsford Lane

Life Lane was born near Raleigh, North Carolina. His parents, Edward and Clarissa Lane, were enslaved house servants (commonly called "house slaves") in the family of Sherwood Haywood in Raleigh. The surname Lane came from their original owners. The only child, Lunsford Lane also became a servant at the family. This gave him far more opportunities than were available to enslaved field workers (then called "field slaves"), but he still dreamt of freedom.

Five years later, in 1840, he was notified that since he got his freedom in New York, he violated a state law forbidding free blacks from other states from staying in North Carolina for more than 20 days. He petitioned for an exception, but was forced to leave the next year. Forbidden from living in his home town, he moved to New York and Boston in the north. There he earned money to free his family by speaking at abolitionist meetings.

In 1842 he returned to Raleigh to buy the rest of his family. Despite prior assurances, he was arrested for delivering abolitionist lectures in the North. He was released, but taken by a mob to the gallows in the wood and tarred and feathered. and then in 1845, moving to Cambridge where his youngest daughter was born. Census records and Cambridge city directories during that period list a number of occupations for Lane including book agent, physician and manufacturer of patent medicines. In 1863 Lane was working as a steward at Wellington's Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts

In 1855, poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow welcomed him into his home Craigie House in Cambridge, Massachusetts as a guest.

After the death of his youngest daughter in April 1872, Lunsford Lane moved to Greenwich Village in New York City; he died sometime during the month of June 1879 in a multi-family tenement at 15 Cornelia Street in the West Village of dropsy and old age. Shortly before his death he helped found a school in New Bern, North Carolina.

In 2019, a historical marker honoring him was erected on Edenton Street in Raleigh.

It was well received and was reprinted three times in six years.

Biographies Much of what is known about Lunsford Lane comes from his own narrative above and the contemporary biography by William George Hawkins: Lunsford Lane; or, Another Helper from North Carolina. He is also given a chapter in John Spencer Bassett's Anti-Slavery Leaders of North Carolina of 1898.