Spencer Crew, The Underground Railroad in the Ohio River Valley

I had to do a couple of tests yesterday that required me to start something in the lab and then leave it alone for an hour, so I wandered over to a talk sponsored by the History department. Spencer Crew, the former director of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, OH was in the area to speak at a conference being held in Albany, and came to campus to tell us that we're all Philistines.

Well, OK, that was just his half-serious opening. His main point was to talk about the Underground Railroad (you can get an outline from Wikipedia, of course), and particularly the less-well-known activities of Underground Railroad conductors in the Midwest. Everybody knows about Harriet Tubman and the East Coast branch, which is dramatized in slightly cheesey form in this interactive National Geographic site. Something like 30,000 escaped slaves were helped to freedom along a route passing through the Ohio River valley, though, and their story is no less compelling.

The talk mostly consisted of anecdotes about prominent Underground Railroad "conductors" such as Levi Coffin (sometimes called the "president" of the Underground Railroad, who helped thousands of slaves escape, and incidentally had an ego the size of a planet), John Parker (a former slave who became a businessman in Ripley, Ohio but continued to make regular raids into Kentucky to free slaves) and John Rankin (a Presbyterian minister and prominent abolitionist). Crew spoke mostly off -the cuff, with occasional references to notes, and painted a compelling picture of the dangers faced by people involved with the Underground Railroad, and the courage required.

The most comment-worthy part of the talk came in the question period afterwards, when somebody asked (citing a historian whose name I forget) whether interest in the Underground Railroad isn't mostly a way for white people to feel better about themselves. Crew allowed that this was an important element of the Freedom Center's approach-- they get visitors to engage with the idea of slavery not by looking for villains but by celebrating heroes. He also said, though, that they get lots of people saying that "Oh, I definitely would've been an abolitionist back then," and they try to challenge them by saying "Fine. If you would've been an abolitionist in the 1840's, what are you doing today to make the world a better place?"

The historical anecdotes were fascinating, and the message promoted by the museum is admirable. So, here's my trivial contribution to publicizing them and their good works.