Never Caught, the Story of Ona Judge: George and Martha Washington's Courageous Slave Who Dared to Run Away; Young Readers Edition

Never Caught: The Story of Ona Judge (2019) recounts the true story of Ona Judge, formerly enslaved by George and Martha Washington. Judge fled enslavement alone in 1796 to New Hampshire. Despite discovering her whereabouts, the Washingtons were unable to bring Judge back into captivity, and she lived the rest of her life as a free citizen. The book delves into the struggles faced by Black enslaved people as the abolition movement takes root and begins to divide the new nation. Co-authored by Erica Armstrong Dunbar and Kathleen Van Cleve, this is the Young Reader’s version of Armstrong Dunbar’s work of adult nonfiction by the same title, which was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award in Nonfiction and was awarded the Frederick Douglass Book Award in 2018. The book received the School Library Journal’s Best Nonfiction Book Award in 2019, was a Children’s History Book Prize finalist, and appeared on the New York Public Library’s Best Books for Kids Top 10 List. Other work by Dunbar is Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave.

Armstrong Dunbar is a historian and lecturer of African American history at Rutgers University.