by Charles Blockson
When my mom saw the book, she wanted to look at it. Rifling through the index, she found that my great-great-great uncle, Jonathon Walker, was listed!
If you are interested in the Underground Railroad and the extremes that people took to either gain their own freedom or the freedom of others-even to the point of being branded (my great-great-great uncle was branded with a double "S" on his right hand. It was meant as "slave stealer;" he proudly claimed it meant "slave savior"), this book is a valuable resource. It lists buildings used in the Underground Railroad, monuments erected to heroes in the railroad, even the scoundrels whose insistence on retaining slaves and recapturing escaped slaves gave the Railroad its urgency.
If you plan to travel to see any sites, this book contains hours for visitation as well as addresses for contacts to make arrangements. Because of spotty funding for some sites, the visiting hours are erratic and the author encourages calling ahead of time. Sites are listed by geographical area and cover sites in 20 states.
The book also contains a chronology of the Underground Railroad, songs of the Underground Railroad, a suggested tour to follow Harriet Tubman's trail, a listing of Underground Railroad tour organizations, a list of African-American anti-slave newspapers, and a glossary of terms.
I found the book to be very helpful in planning trips to visit Underground Railroad sites. Pick a path and select the sites along that path. Sites filed by areas of the nation mean you can plan weekend jaunts as well as weeklong vacations and include seeing these sites in your plans.
The contact information is also proving very helpful. I have been able to write to the entities that keep these sites running or maintained and gotten valuable information as resource material for my articles on this topic.
The weakness of the book is its grammar. At times I had to read a sentence several times to decipher its meaning. A more thorough proofreading would have helped.
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