Introduction
How well does our Jewish Community know the story of the Underground Railroad? And how well do we know the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center that now defines Cincinnati’s skyline as viewed from Kentucky? We know the Nancy and David Wolf Holocaust and Humanity Center and its mission of demonstrating how understanding the horrors of the Shoah and other crimes against Jews can be a catalyst for humanity education. Do we know that the Freedom Center demonstrates the parallel story of how crimes against Africans as they were involuntarily forced into slave ships and brought as chattel property to the New World can encourage visitors to help repair the world? As vilified minorities throughout our history, Jews and African-Americans share stories of emancipation from slavery to freedom. Jews have Passover, and African-Americans have Juneteenth —holidays celebrating our respective freedom stories. The African-American story is one that all Americans should know and celebrate if our nation is ever to overcome the legacy of slavery that permeates every nook and cranny of our society and culture. Jewish philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel, who was rescued by Hebrew Union College and brought to Cincinnati from Europe before the Shoah, observed that “Morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings. Indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, [and] in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.”
Exercising that responsibility begins with knowledge of the evil for which we take responsibility to overcome. As a museum of conscience, the Freedom Center is a good place to start our education. There are implicit and even explicit connections to Jews throughout the museum, most immediately in the prominence of the Skirball Traveling Exhibit Gallery. This important part of the museum was endowed with a gift from the foundation established by Rabbi Jack Skirball, an alumnus of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. That foundation believes that endowing this part of the Freedom Center was a mitzvah, a commandment, because the story retold by the Freedom Center is essentially the same story Jews retell at Passover and reference throughout the liturgical year. Thus, slavery, the Civil War, the post-war Constitutional Amendments, the Civil Rights Movement, and the still evolving efforts to overcome racism comprise the African-American parallel story to the Jewish story told in the Passover Haggadah. The Skirball Foundation’s mitzvah is a statement of solidarity, that one must feel the suffering of one’s fellow human beings and take responsibility for overcoming it.
The mission of the Freedom Center is evident in the placement, design, and architecture of the building that graces the central Cincinnati riverfront, right behind the Roebling Suspension Bridge. Its location alone is a testament to African-American persistence in seeking to cross the Ohio River from a slave to a free state. Henceforth, the building sits as the emblem of the Queen City in every picture postcard from the south of downtown Cincinnati. The Freedom Center is, as it should be, of special interest to Jews whose role in the long and often difficult American immigration experience occurred within a slave-holding country until the end of the Civil War, and continued throughout Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement (in which Jews played an outsized role), into the age of Black Lives Matter and the backlash against Critical Race Theory. As we revel in the bicentennial celebrations this past year of the Jewish community in Cincinnati, we ought to know something of African-American history in America and in Cincinnati especially.
The Story
Most of us know at least the outlines of the story of the Underground Railroad. Started by clandestine activity in the night in the late eighteenth century, the message of the Underground Railroad’s secret network grew along the northern banks of the Ohio River. Here escaping slaves first set foot on free-state soil, often with the help of courageous women and men, black and white, Jewish and gentile, who ran the Underground Railroad. This is a great interracial, civil, and human rights story. Moving under cover of darkness to avoid detection by slave catchers and bounty hunters, fleeing slaves often were assisted by abolitionist “conductors” and “stationmasters” who lighted candles in windows and church steeples as beacons of safe passage, to offer a secure night’s sleep in a hidden attic or barn. Across the Ohio River came the escaping slaves reaching for the help of those in a free state who might channel them toward freedom in Canada, even Mexico and the Caribbean. The context for the search for freedom included the most hated case in American legal history, the 1857 Dred Scot decision, in which Chief Justice Taney, for the court, ruled that an escaped slave in a free state remained the chattel property of his owner and must, upon capture, be returned to his owner and to the condition of slavery. The Civil War followed soon thereafter.
The Origins
The idea for this national center dedicated to the study and interpretation of the Underground Railroad was first proposed in 1994 by the Cincinnati chapter of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, which today continues as EquaSion, with its annual Festival of Faiths among other programs, which are also of special interest to Cincinnati’s Jewish community. The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center was incorporated as a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization in 1995 with a Board of Directors made up of community leaders, and an initial feasibility study was conducted. When the board sought land as part of Cincinnati’s riverfront redevelopment, it was repeatedly told it could not be done. It was warned that the Freedom Center would never get the land it wanted—the building is, in fact, built in the air on top of a garage—and it would never raise the money. A national Advisory Board of prominent business, religious, academic, and civic leaders was created to provide a broad-based national perspective. These have included, among others, Alfred Gottschalk (former president of Hebrew Union College), Elie Wiesel, Andrew Young, Toni Morrison, Henry Louis Gates, John Pepper, Maya Angelou, Vernon Jordan, Quincy Jones, Jack Kemp, and Myrlie Evers-Williams, the widow of Medgar Evers. Rosa Parks, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Dorothy Height, and Presidents William J. Clinton and George H.W. Bush also have taken a keen interest in the Freedom Center and have been honored with the Freedom Center’s prestigious International Freedom Conductor Award. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama have visited. Muhammad Ali presided over the groundbreaking, and First Lady Laura Bush presided over the grand opening. Today, the Freedom Center is secure being part of the Cincinnati Museum Center which also provides the physical space for the Wolf Holocaust and Humanity Center at Union Terminal.
Mission and Vision
While the story of the Underground Railroad is set within the context of slavery, visitors to the Freedom Center are carefully guided to experience their confrontation with the evil of slavery as a powerful springboard for action today. One’s visit should be positive, constructive, and solution-oriented. This is a museum not of past slavery but of hope for the future. The core feature of the Freedom Center is its presentation of the stories of the Underground Railroad, as well as of other freedom movements. It is how these stories are presented, and what they mean today, that distinguishes the Freedom Center from the traditional history museum experience. Visitors from many countries have said how inspirational their visits were to their efforts to fight human trafficking and to advance freedom in their own countries. Students as far away as China have written to say how the Freedom Center’s website alone has inspired them to work for freedom. By feeling the suffering of the victims of slavery, one is intended to take responsibility for overcoming its consequences and for fighting against it in today’s world.
In using these stories, the Freedom Center makes clear the precious and precarious nature of liberty, justice, and equality, which are increasingly at risk throughout the world today. The Freedom Center is intended to be a catalyst for thought and action on the meaning of freedom today–that this encounter with slavery and the Underground Railroad will send visitors away with a renewed commitment to preserve and extend freedom in their own lives and the lives of others. In the words of the Freedom Center’s Mission:
“We reveal stories about freedom’s heros, from the era of the Underground Railroad to contemporary times, challenging and inspiring everyone to take courageous steps for freedom today.”
The Building
The one hundred and ten million dollar Freedom Center building is built on the prime location in the heart of a billion-dollar development currently transforming Cincinnati’s historic riverfront. It consists of three linked pavilions close to the banks of the Ohio River – the “River Jordan” that, for many escaping slaves, was the last natural barrier to the “Promised Land” of the free state of Ohio.
The Freedom Center is designed -– by the Blackburn and Boora architectural firms –- with walls of glass to provide visitors with a panoramic view of the riverfront park, the Ohio River, and Kentucky. This location constitutes the line between the slave South and the free North. The Center’s site, at the landing of the historic Roebling Suspension Bridge, begun before but finished only after the Civil War, is the symbolic gateway to Cincinnati and to freedom.
The tripartite building stands on top of a four hundred car parking garage and a multi-modal transit center. It is located between the Cincinnati Bengals’ Paul Brown/Paycor Stadium and the Cincinnati Reds’ Great American Ball Park. It is part of an evolving mixed-use redevelopment called The Banks. Juxtaposed against the large football and baseball stadiums, as well as other projects now completed, the Freedom Center could easily have been dwarfed by its neighbors. Yet it succeeds in achieving a distinct and proud presence that anchors the end of Roebling Bridge with a strong and imposing sculptural form.
The monument standing in front of the building is dedicated to the heroism of Cincinnati’s famous Black Brigade of African-American soldiers who crossed from Cincinnati to Kentucky to fight for the Union. They crossed on a pontoon bridge constructed right next to the unfinished Roebling Bridge.
Along the threshold at the entrance to the building along Rosa Parks Way is a stone graphic in the paving, a symbolic river and crossing. The building shapes also recall the idea of the river. This is inspired by Langston Hughes’s poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”:
I’ve known rivers; I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
The building is organized into three connected pavilions that represent three themes in the Center’s mission – Courage, Cooperation and Perseverance. The pavilions also represent the three branches of our Constitutional government guaranteeing our freedom and also the three post-Civil War Constitutional Amendments, the Thirteenth abolishing slavery, the Fourteenth providing equal protection of the law regardless of race, and the Fifteenth securing the right to vote regardless of race. While the northern bank of the Ohio River was an important landing, most slaves kept moving north past Cincinnati, thus the paths that move through and past the pavilions are symbolic of Cincinnati’s role as a historic way-station rather than a final destination on the journey to freedom. This is a reminder that staying put in Cincinnati left an escaped slave prey to slave-catchers, just as the Dred Scot decision ruled.
Materials for the building have weight, permanence, and earthy characteristics. These materials will weather beautifully yet retain the quality of roughness. Materials such as unpolished Travertine marble blocks with their rugged cleft finish, granite from Zimbabwe, African wooden floors, and copper cladding were chosen to symbolize the strong and resilient character required of both the escaping slaves and the Freedom Conductors. The copper will experience the vicissitudes of the elements over time, just as have African-Americans to this day, and will gradually weather to a green patina like the Statue of Liberty, to which it is a reference.
The narrow spaces between the three pavilions also symbolize the narrow passage through which escaping slaves had to travel avoiding the elements, slave-catchers and pro-slavery men and women at every turn along the way. These narrow passages recall for Jews the narrow places, the “mitzraim,” recounted at the Passover Seder and throughout the Siddur. The unpolished travertine marble shows that the road of escape was rough—most of those who started to escape turned back, died, or were captured.
Taken together, the three pavilions contain spaces for museum exhibits, story theaters, a multi-use theater, educational facilities, a research institute, and a gift shop and bookstore. At the upper levels, the pavilions are connected by way of glass bridges to accommodate public movement and provide visitors with light and views as they move from one exhibit to another. A large central circular stair encloses the elevators and spirals upwards to the third floor galleries, in a gesture of upward movement, of hope for freedom yet to come. A large, south-facing public roof garden on the third floor serves as a reflective garden. The Eternal Flame on the terrace represents the candle in the window of the Safe House along the Underground Railroad. (This flame can be observed, especially at night, while driving downtown on the interstate in Northern Kentucky, and more than one driver has seen the flame and thought the Freedom Center was ablaze, fearfully calling the Fire Department.) The fourth and fifth floors of the center pavilion house the Center’s research, education, and administrative spaces. The ceiling of the multi-use theater features a field of stars that represents the sky above Cincinnati at 5:30 A.M., January 1, 1863, the effective date of the Emancipation Proclamation, just before the dawn of a new day and a new era of hope.
Thus, the Freedom Center is to Cincinnati what the great arch is to St. Louis.
The Icon
Integral to the building and permanently affixed to it is the world famous Slave Pen, the only remaining example of its kind.
It looks like an old log cabin, a remnant of our rural past. It came to Cincinnati from a farm near Walton, Kentucky, where for the last one hundred and fifty years it was used to store tobacco. The truth is more horrific. The two-story, one-room building was used to warehouse slaves. Women and men were kept shackled in the pen until their owner, slave trader John W. Anderson, felt the market price was right, and then he sent them, literally down the river, to auction in Natchez or New Orleans. Even after importation of slaves was outlawed, slaves continued to give birth to more slaves, and the internal slave trade continued to prosper as Southerners benefitted economically from their chattel property. One can read on display the names of the slaves in the inventory of this slave owner’s Kentucky probate estate. Anderson died, poetically enough, while in pursuit of escaping slaves.
This 1830s structure is the emotional centerpiece of the Freedom Center. I have witnessed descendants of slaves wiping tears from their eyes and telling their children and grandchildren about their enslaved ancestors. This icon closely parallels the boxcar on display in the Holocaust Museum at the Smithsonian in Washington. The slave pen still has the original hooks for the rings and chains to which the slaves were shackled. It bears witness to atrocities, and challenges visitors to act against modern horrors, just as the boxcar cries out in agony for action against antisemitism.
The Challenge
Cincinnati was the epicenter of what many consider to be the first American civil rights movement. More than five hundred Underground Railroad routes radiated from the Ohio River waterfront. The city was home to Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” a blockbuster that fueled abolitionist zeal. Cincinnati was where Margaret Garner fled from Kentucky in 1856, hiding with her 3 year old daughter. When they were cornered by slave catchers in downtown Cincinnati, Garner killed her child rather than see her returned to slavery. Toni Morrison based her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Beloved, on Garner’s tragedy, and the Cincinnati Opera commissioned and performed a powerful new opera based on this tragedy in celebration of the Freedom Center’s grand opening in 2004.
This burden of American history is heavy and challenging. Even after Emancipation, and after the Civil Rights Amendments, Reconstruction failed, Jim Crowe was firmly entrenched, and the Ku Klux Klan won Southern politics. Legal enforcement of white superiority and black inferiority was still confirmed as constitutional doctrine by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson which upheld that “separate but equal” was the law. Dr. W.E.B. DuBois wrote in his classic 1903 book, “Souls of Black Folk,” that the problem of the twentieth century would be “the problem of the color line.” Sadly prophetic, it is still the problem of America in the twenty first century. It took fifty eight years after Plessy — until 1954 — for the Supreme Court to issue the decision in Brown v. Board of Education overruling the separate but equal doctrine. And its promise remains largely unfulfilled.
Frederick Douglass warned that the road to freedom from slavery would not be easy:
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening, they want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.”
Cincinnati lawyer Salmon P. Chase represented many escaping slaves but lost almost all his cases. He ran for president even after having accepted Lincoln’s appointment as Chief Justice, seeking the presidency after Lincoln’s assassination for both parties in 1868. Chase represented so many escaped slaves on the Underground Railroad that he was called the “attorney general for runaway slaves.” He is buried in Cincinnati’s Spring Grove Cemetery. J.P. Morgan Chase Bank carries his name in his honor.
Langston Hughes sums up the challenge still faced by African-Americans today:
“That Justice is a blind goddess is a thing to which we black are wise:
Her bandage hides two festering sores that once perhaps were eyes.”
Something is obviously amiss when African Americans represent thirty eight percent of those in prison but only thirteen percent of the population.
The Future
The vision of a future, brave country transformed from a society built on the backs of slaves (and, one must add, on the genocide of Native Americans) into a progressive, truthful, compassionate, forgiving democracy, with equal justice for all, would be unique in world history. This vision is far from assured, but this is the hope held out by the Freedom Center’s mission. Today there are some twenty seven million people in bondage throughout the world. The goal of the Freedom Center is to inspire freedom conductors on a reinvigorated worldwide Underground Railroad.
American Jews know that today’s Germans are not guilty of the Shoah, but we hold them, and they generally hold themselves, responsible to overcome it, through reparations among other actions. Likewise, white Americans are not guilty of slavery that was ended over a century and a half ago; but we are responsible for overcoming it. The racist consequences of America’s past slaveholding society still hold our modern American civilization by the throat. Look everywhere at African American poverty and inequality in all their countless manifestations, at the vicious cycle of causes and consequences. In addition, much of the infrastructure of modern America was built by slaves, as institutions like Harvard and the University of Virginia are confessing and taking steps to amend. Unless America finds a way out of the dark and continuing consequences of America’s slaveholding past, unless Americans learn the lessons of history so that we can take action to overcome the legacy of slavery, American civilization will have failed. And if America, even with all its imperfections, is one of the last, best hopes to end human enslavement in the world today, it must take responsibility for and overcome its own past.
Americans must educate, advocate, support, elect, produce, engage, encourage, and become the best kind of leaders throughout our country if we are ever to deserve to be called that City on a Hill to which the Puritan leader, John Winthop, called America as early as 1630 only a decade after the Pilgrims had landed at Plymouth. A century and a half later, in a letter written by John Adams to Abigail during the American Revolution, he said, “We can’t guarantee success in this war, but we can do something better. We can deserve it.” While we do not know what the future success of the Freedom Center’s mission will be, history makes clear that unless we the people set a dream in front of us — a dream like that of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial — and then work hard to achieve it, then America does not deserve to succeed. Indifference to the evil consequences of America’s slaveholding past is, as Heschel warns, worse than slavery itself. We may not today be guilty of slavery, but we are responsible to overcome it. The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center arms those who experience it with the Courage, Cooperation, and Perseverance to act.
