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[CHATTER] [LAUGHTER]

CHRIS ROBERTS: It's nighttime. And the temperature hovers near freezing as a procession of 27 people make their way down a road bordering Camp Tannadoonah, a wilderness area just West of the Twin Cities. Overhead, the North Star and the Big Dipper or the Drinking Gourd as Harriet Tubman referred to it are hidden behind a layer of wispy clouds.

The group's leader, Kamau Kambui, with a battery operated spotlight resting on the bill of his baseball cap turns left through some underbrush and pulls up in a clearing, separating the road from a line of trees.

KAMAU KAMBUI: OK, everybody. We are going to start into the woods. And the reason why we don't have flashlights is because we're developing our night vision. And right now, what we're doing is using that. And as it gets darker, there'll be places where there's a good deal of tree canopy above us, which will get-- which will make it much darker than it is right now.

And at those times, let's go--

[SCREAMING]

CHRIS ROBERTS: Suddenly a light shines from across a field illuminating all 27 people. And in that instant, they become runaway slaves. Kamau Kambui has been recreating the Underground Railroad for people of all ages in Minnesota for the last four years. Kambui says the concept came to him in a dream when he was 12. He began to refine it as a youth worker in Michigan.

He says for participants, when the escape out of bondage actually begins, the unifying factor is fear.

KAMAU KAMBUI: I think that what develops as a result of that fear and conquering that fear, which is something that most people are able to do, is to have an appreciation of what ancestors have done for us and provided for us to stand on their shoulders, to be where we are today. And that's people of every ethnic background.

Pull together. Everybody stay low. Stay low. Come down low.

[WHISPERING]

WOMAN: Oh, my god, listen.

KAMAU KAMBUI: What we're going to have to do is to separate. What I'm going to do is just on the other side of this tall grass, we're going to take ourselves in. The last person is going to squat down and stay low. OK. About 10 or 15 yards up from that, the next person-- the next person till we string ourselves out all in one line. We'll then be quiet for about 15 to 20 minutes.

I want you to listen, feel, taste, smell, hear and call upon your ancestors to be with you, to guide and protect you during this time so that we do not get caught. It's important to be in touch with all the things, all the strength that you need to be quiet alone in the woods. Is everybody OK? All right. Let's continue. Stay low.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Slithering through a meadow of tall grass, members of the group head toward a wooded area where the trees can break up their silhouettes. Before they reach the woods, they lie on the ground for several minutes soaking up the night, wondering when as slaves they will again encounter the owners who are trying to capture them.

SLAVE OWNER (YELLING): Right here! There's a whole mess of them. Get over here. Get over here.

MAN: Pick up the money.

CHRIS ROBERTS: If there is anything that Kamau Kambui wants the re-enactment to accomplish, it's to link America's past to the present. He says it touches on historical experiences, that all ethnic groups share. The tradition of living in the outdoors, for example, or of fleeing oppression. Kambui describes the simulation as an exercise to counter racism that gives participants a sense of the continuing struggle for freedom and a point of comparison for modern day Black America.

KAMAU KAMBUI: There are young Black men being shot down. There are young Black men being arrested. There are more young African males in prison than there are in college. And you could rattle on with the statistics. I think the point is that we don't glorify enough what the battles which have been won are.

CHRIS ROBERTS: For the next hour, the escape along the Underground Railroad continues through the woods, through the thicket, across the barbed wire fences, with a group pausing now and then for a headcount or waiting quietly under trees while Kambui diverts pursuing slave owners. Eventually, they reach a safe house provided by a Quaker woman where a small campfire is lit.

WOMAN: I've had the fire banked hoping you would come. I'll keep it low so it doesn't destroy thy night vision. Dost thou need refreshments?

KAMAU KAMBUI: Yes.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Then a demonstration from Kambui of the knowledge and skills Harriet Tubman used to care for her fellow fugitive slaves.

KAMAU KAMBUI: What Harriet used to do on a night like this just to make sure that everybody had something to eat. They were real ingenious ways of cooking.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Using a mixture of dried leaves and beeswax as a fuel, Kambui starts another fire, then places a tin can with air holes at the bottom on top of the flame. The tin can becomes a stove so he can fry an egg. Harriet Tubman was also a root doctor, Kambui tells the group, borrowing from African traditions and learning other techniques from Native Americans. He passes around some tree bark containing a natural pain reliever, pine needles used to make tea enriched with vitamin C, moistened oak leaves which were applied to sores. Cat-tails, Kambui says had a variety of uses.

KAMAU KAMBUI: The entire plant is edible. And in the early spring, you can eat this just like corn, it's delicious. Also if women were on their menstrual period in the fall, this turns to a-- no, no, no, it's-- not like a tampon. No. But the fur that goes to seed in the fall could be peeled off, put between sheets or pieces of cloth and used as an absorbent to be kind of a sterile pad.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Soon a member of the group announces that slave owners with shackles are approaching the campsite. The Quaker woman leads the group to a path down a steep ravine, and the exodus resumes heading westward. At 1:30 in the morning, the group reaches a final barrier, a swamp full of thick, waist high water. 75 yards away, a cabin sits on top of a hill representing freedom.

[SPLASHING]

A sulfuric smell permeates the air as the group wades through the water, stirring up the bog, sinking down into 6 inches of sludge underneath. Halfway across the swamp, a woman collapses.

[SPLASHING]

WOMAN: Do me a favor and don't stay, please.

[INAUDIBLE]

I know, terrible.

MAN: What are you doing? OK. OK. We got to keep moving.

WOMAN: I know, but I'm exhausted.

MAN: OK. I know. It's all right. OK. Over here.

[CHATTER]

CHRIS ROBERTS: Soaking wet and covered with muck, group members finally reach freedom on the other side.

WOMAN: Freedom, this way. Can I grab something?

WOMAN: You made it.

WOMAN: Made it, Mike.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Afterward at the cabin while awaiting showers and a warm bed, the participants spent time reflecting on what they had just been through.

WOMAN: I found myself feeling like, well, if I can only stay with our leader, stay as close as I can to our leader, everything will be OK. And I wonder if a lot of people ended up feeling maybe that back in the days of the Underground Railroad, if we can only stay close to Harriet Tubman, you know, she'll keep us safe. I almost I almost felt like it was a magical thing for me.

MAN: The one thing we're never told about is about the slaves that turned in anger upon the people that were chasing them. I can't believe that after having gone through all that running and jumping and screaming and hollering and walking through the bog, that at some point some of the slaves would just say, to hell with this, and turn to try to capture or kill the people that were chasing them.

WOMAN: At one point while we were lying on the ground and we could hear the chains, I just sat back and I prayed for our ancestors who had to go through that and it was real. And I can just really see people dying along the way, the minute they were just so much to see and they would have been shot. And it just made me sit back and pray for them because I just felt so bad and so scared for myself at that time.

WOMAN: When he finally said, those lights up there is freedom, I was like, Thank God. You know, I mean someone mentioned to me, we can end this tonight. We can go take a shower and that'll be it. But for those slaves, it was months, and days and days and days of this. And even when they reached freedom, there still wasn't any guarantee.

CHRIS ROBERTS: More than a third of the group was Black, a few were Native American. The rest were white. Group member Melanie Smith, who's white, believes that the reenactment provided an opportunity for healing.

MELANIE SMITH: Both of our peoples still carry around a great deal of scars from this type of oppression and the oppression that still exists. I mean, we-- I think things that happened today just bring up the feelings from these old scars. And by being able to go back and re-experience them and re-experience them together, I think it starts to heal some of the wounds that have been dealt by my people to theirs. And I think it's a good way to do it.

CHRIS ROBERTS: But participant Pete Ice says he mainly felt frustration. Ice, who grew up in the South, and now lives in Minneapolis, says he came away with a heightened concern about the fundamental gulf that separates Blacks and whites.

PETE ICE: I feel like things haven't changed, and that's scary. Now I live in a city that's filled with multiple cultures. And I don't think that we completely understand each other's culture. And it's just scary. It was the first time that I've had a chance to experience the other side.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Ersi Alan says the experience helps him understand why history has painted slaves who escaped on the Underground Railroad as heroic because of their struggle.

ERSI ALAN: It's because they want to say less, think less of the horror that they had to go through by painting them as being beautiful, noble people. It makes history play easier. OK. And that's strictly a white perspective. Because now that I've been introduced to the real world of this, a part of it, even a very small part of it, I'm not willing to accept that. I mean, there was nothing particularly ennobling about that experience. That was a horrible experience to go through. I don't know that horror ennobles people. I think that horror does terrible things to the human being.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Group member Antar Celine says as an African-American, he will refer to the experience as a reminder.

ANTAR CELINE: Too many of us forget this. So we say everything is fine, you know. I've got my car. And I've got my house, you know. So where is the struggle? This reminds us, again, that not only did our ancestors go through the struggle, but it reminds us of the current struggle that we're still in.

CHRIS ROBERTS: What remains for Celine are questions. In this current environment, he asks, how do you create an Underground Railroad in your company, your neighborhood? How do you create a vision that moves all of mankind in a direction toward freedom? This is Chris Roberts.