ARCHY LEE TEE

“I don't want to go back to Mississippi.”

The back of this tee carries the woodcut cover art of Archy Lee: A California Fugitive Slave Case: a young man on the run, bundle over his shoulder. It tells the story of one of California's biggest freedom fights.

In October 1857, Charles Stovall brought Archy Lee, then about 18 and enslaved, from Mississippi to Sacramento and hired him out for wages. California was a free state, and Black abolitionists Charles W. Parker and Charles Hackett told Lee his rights. When Stovall planned to take him back to Mississippi in January 1858, Lee ran. Police arrested him at the Hackett House Hotel, and in court he said plainly: “I don't want to go back to Mississippi.”

A Sacramento judge freed him on January 26, but the California Supreme Court sided with Stovall. Abolitionists stopped Stovall from shipping Lee out by steamer, and San Francisco's Zion AME Church raised money across the country for his defense. On April 6, 1858, U.S. Commissioner George Pen Johnston ruled in Lee's favor, and he walked free.

Later that year he moved to British Columbia during the Fraser River gold rush, ran a freight business and bought property. By 1862 he was a self-employed barber in Nevada. Lee wasn't escaping into a free state. He was refusing to be taken back into slavery, and he won.

• Large back print, small B.A.M. front chest logo
• B.A.M neck print
• White tee, black print
• Sizes S–3X (2X and 3X add $3)

Source: Angela Reiniche, “Archy Lee, the California Trail,” National Park Service. From the BY ANY MEANS collection.

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