Stevie Wonder Adapts, Underground Railroad Love Story Book author Betty DeRamus

 Join The Gist of Freedom, Thursday February 13th, as we welcome author Betty DeRamus, our guest for a special show in honor of Black History Month and Valentine’s Day!

NBC announced that it is producing an eight-hour miniseries about love stories on the Underground Railroad, with Stevie Wonder serving as executive producer.

The miniseries, titled Freedom Run, is an adaptation of Betty DeRamus’s 2005 book Forbidden Fruit: Love Stories From the Underground Railroad. It will focus on three “specific epic journeys and love stories, each based on actual people,” according to NBC.

Betty will  talk about her first book, Forbidden Fruit: Love Stories from the Underground Railroad, a collection of true stories about enslaved couples—and a few interracial ones—who took extraordinary steps to avoid being separated  during the slavery era.

Betty's book Celebrates the Black men and women who fought to preserve their relationships during the slavery era. These romantic and heart- wrenching stories  come to life in author Betty DeRamus’s two acclaimed non-fiction books. Forbidden Fruit: Love Stories from the Underground Railroad (Atria 2005) and Freedom by Any Means: True Stories of Cunning and Courage on the Underground Railroad (Atria 2009.

Forbidden Fruit is a collection of true stories about black couples (and a few interracial ones) who defied mobs, bloodhounds, bounty hunters and bullets to avoid being separated by slave masters, distance and time. Wrote author Herb Boyd: “Betty DeRamus has tapped a heretofore unknown vein of Black culture: love stories from the Underground Railroad.”

The book’s characters include a free black man who voluntarily became a slave to remain with his enslaved wife, and a runaway slave who carried his ailing wife to freedom on his back.