A Thousand Miles and Counting

One December morning in 1848, William and Ellen Craft, an enslaved couple from Macon, Georgia, risked everything to live free. From Macon to Savannah, Charleston to Boston, they faced many dangers and the never-ending fear of discovery. Their story demonstrates courage, inventiveness, and determination in the relentless pursuit of what should have been theirs from birth: liberty. In the SCAD-produced documentary A Thousand Miles and Counting, William and Ellen Craft's daring escape from slavery is retold by descendants of the Craft family — Gail DeCosta, Peggy Trotter Dammond Preacely, and Vicki Davis Williams — along with Dr. Walter O. Evans, a member of the Ruskin Society and benefactor of the SCAD Museum of Art's Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art, and Joël Díaz, director of the museum's Walter O. Evans Center for African American Studies. Along their journey, the Crafts passed through the Central of Georgia Railway depot — the very place where the SCAD Museum of Art stands today. As part of SCAD deFINE ART 2016, SCAD honored the Crafts and their incredible story by commissioning and installing a commemorative bronze medallion — designed by SCAD graduate and foundation studies professor Andrew MacDonald (SCAD M.F.A., illustration, 2014) — in the museum's lobby. Dr. Walter O. Evans originally shared the story of the Crafts with SCAD President and Founder Paula Wallace during the SCAD Museum of Art's expansion in 2011. Evans added, "This acknowledgment by SCAD — recognizing the passage of the Crafts through this place that today stands as an educational and cultural junction of the highest order — is a perfect illustration of how SCAD rises to every occasion, taking care to celebrate narratives both well-known and lesser known so that we all might share in the universality of the human experience."