## The Legacy in Books and Walls
Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom has never gone out of print. It circulates as a primary source for courses on American slavery, on the slave narrative tradition, on women’s history, on the history of race and performance in America. The questions scholars bring to it have changed over time: early readers focused primarily on the drama of the escape; later readers have focused increasingly on Ellen’s role, on the narrative’s construction of race and gender, on what the text claims and what it evades.
Barbara McCaskill, who teaches at the University of Georgia, has done the most sustained scholarly work on the Crafts as historical and cultural figures. Her research has particularly examined Ellen’s position — as a woman who is frequently remembered as the subject of her husband’s narrative rather than as an agent in her own right, and as a figure whose light skin made her escape possible in ways that complicate straightforward narratives of solidarity and resistance.
In Britain, there are physical traces. A blue plaque on a building in Hammersmith marks where the Crafts lived. The National Library of Scotland has mounted exhibitions that include their story. The English Heritage organization has documented their time in England as part of a broader project of recovering the history of Black Britons and Black people in British history.
In Georgia, the Georgia Women of Achievement inducted Ellen in 1996, a formal recognition of her place in the state’s history by an institution in the state that once legally classified her as property. The Woodville School site — the farm they acquired, built on, and lost — is in Bryan County. The William and Ellen Craft Foundation works to preserve and extend awareness of their story.