I'm with Q on this one. I'm a folklorist. I think the folklore about slaves running away is fascinating. It includes stories about songs like "follow the drinking gourd." It includes the tale that "Hush Puppies" were named because they were fed to the hounds hunting runaway slaves to keep them quiet. It includes a whole new complex of material about quilts that has convinced many people for a few years now.

BUT:

There's very little evidence for any of it. It's very PC, because it suggests how smart the escaping slaves were: they could code and decode messages, pass them on in secret, escape detection, etc. But, as many have pointed out, you couldn't actually use "Follow the Drinking Gourd" to escape unless someone explained to you at length what each image meant. Once you're having extensive conversations of that kind, the coded nature of the song becomes much less useful. Same goes for quilts used to direct people on the UR (the evidence for which is even slimmer, and the hushpuppies story is plain nonsense. It's on the same order as Ring Around the Rosie being about the plague.

There are some smart people with a lot invested in stories of this nature. Bernice Johnson-Reagon of Sweet Honey is one of them, as is Tukufu Zuberi from History Detectives. But I think a lot of scholars would be more critical, especially in private where the non-PC nature of their comments wouldn't hurt them.