Keith P. Griffler

Uses letters, reminiscences, and oral histories to examine the interracial enterprise known as the Underground Railroad and to explore the risks taken by daring and courageous African Americans and whites in the Ohio River Valley.

African Americans and the Forging of the Underground Railroad in the Ohio Valley

Front Line of Freedom

The Underground Railroad, an often misunderstood antebellum institution, has been viewed as a simple combination of mainly white "conductors" and black "passengers." Keith P. Griffler takes a new, battlefield-level view of the war against American slavery as he reevaluates one of its front lines: the Ohio River, the longest commercial dividing line between slavery and freedom. In shifting the focus from the much discussed white-led "stations" to the primarily black-led frontline struggle along the Ohio, Griffler reveals for the first time the crucial importance of the freedom movement in the river's port cities and towns. Front Line of Freedom fully examines America's first successful interracial freedom movement, which proved to be as much a struggle to transform the states north of the Ohio as those to its south. In a climate of racial proscription, mob violence, and white hostility, the efforts of Ohio Valley African Americans to establish and maintain communities became inextricably linked to the steady stream of fugitives crossing the region. As Griffler traces the efforts of African Americans to free themselves, Griffler provides a window into the process by which this clandestine network took shape and grew into a powerful force in antebellum America.

Carla Williams

Stephen Marc

Diane E. Miller

For seven years Stephen Marc photographed the routes traveled by fugitive slaves in their search for freedom, documenting and interpreting his research along the way. In Passage on the Underground Railroad, Marc shares the results of these explorations through his thought- provoking, unconventional, and haunting digital images. Marc uses two types of photographic composites to reveal the history of the Underground Railroad (UGRR): multiple photographs that describe UGRR sites and metaphorical montages that address the larger horror of slavery. Each UGRR site has a story, so individual sites are portrayed inside and out, using several photographs in combination to create visual tours. The companion montages evocatively interpret the South's "peculiar institution" from which slaves were fleeing. These multilayered narratives weave together elements from the landscape of slavery--plantation structures, crop fields, waterways, tools of bondage and agriculture, merchant tokens and bank note currency, newspaper articles, and advertisements--along with UGRR site details, antislavery materials, and contemporary cultural references. In addition to the eighty-seven distinctive photographic creations and detailed captions, Passage on the Underground Railroad features an interview with Stephen Marc by Carla Williams, an essay by Keith Griffler, and a piece from Diane Miller discussing the historical significance of the UGRR and the role of the National Park Service's Network to Freedom sites, many of which are interpreted in this book.

Keith P. Griffler

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