Solomon Northup

(c. 1807 - c. 1857)

Born to a freedman in upstate New York, Solomon Northup was a thirty-three-year-old landowner and musician awaiting the birth of his third child when two men kidnapped and sold him into slavery in 1841. Though the popular success of Twelve Years a Slave, published after his 1853 rescue, established him as a popular abolitionist speaker, he disappeared from public records within a decade. In 2013 his memoir became the first one written by an enslaved American to be adapted into a feature film.