Henry Bibb was successful in his escape; but, true to his word, he returned to rescue his family. Betrayed and caught five times, he was finally sold into Texas and never saw his wife and child again.
His final escape, in 1841, took him from Texas to Detroit. There, Bibb devoted himself to ending slavery and campaigning for Black civil rights. Michigan audiences clamored to hear a speaker who had had direct experience of slavery, and Bibb was a dramatic lecturer. Soon he was touring New England and the Midwest, narrating his personal experiences of slavery’s barbarism. Newspaper accounts note that he often moved his audience to tears.
Bibb also remained a practicing Christian throughout his life, and held that slaveholders deliberately kept slaves in ignorance by denying them religious instruction and keeping them illiterate. With that in mind, Bibb raised funds to buy Bibles to distribute to slave families in the south and to free Blacks in the north.
In 1848, the publication of his autobiography, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, made Bibb a household name. The book was an instant success and was published in the United States and Europe.
In September 1850, the American Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law, which gave owners the right to track down and recapture fugitive slaves living in the free states and elsewhere. Knowing that their safety was once again in jeopardy, thousands of ex-slaves fled to Canada, Mexico, the West Indies and even Africa. Most, including Bibb, came to Canada West, now Ontario, where there was a burgeoning refugee community: hundreds of fugitives were arriving at the Windsor border every day, and many needed help.
Bibb urged refugees to come “to the Queen’s country,” but also spoke out against the prejudice the Black people encountered in Canada. He urged Black communities to organize themselves, get an education, and purchase land as a way to fight racial prejudice.
Henry Bibb founded literary, antislavery and debating societies; he also established churches and schools in Ontario. He used the Sunday school movement to educate adults. However, perhaps his most lasting contribution to the Canadian Black freedom movement was the founding of The Voice of the Fugitive, Canada’s first Black newspaper. The first issue of the Voice rolled off the press on 1 January 1851. It was dedicated to antislavery, universal education and social reform.
Bibb would gather some of the information for his newspaper by meeting the boats crossing from Detroit to Canada at Windsor, and interviewing the disembarking fugitive slaves. One day he approached two young arrivals, only to discover that they were his brothers, John and George, whom he had last seen as children. Their other brother, Lewis, arrived later that day. All three went to live with their mother, whose rescue and arrival in Windsor Henry had arranged earlier.
Bibb died on 1 August 1854, after a long illness. He was declared a Person of National Historic Significance by the Government of Canada in 2005.