Who we are
ORGANIZATION
We are a team of scholars, artists, and activists specializing in African American history and driven by the conviction that true, transformative, and ongoing storytelling is foundational to the work of racial healing.
We believe that honest, collaborative, creative, and ongoing storytelling around race in America is foundational to racial healing.
CONVICTION
OUR MISSION
Our Mission is to promote racial healing by elevating the story of the Underground Railroad through scholarly research, creative experiences, and historical memorialization.
Our vision is Racial Healing through Storytelling
The path to a thriving community leads not away from our shared pain, but toward it; to a place where we can clearly see, honestly articulate, and deliberately respond to the wounds that we bear. In our current moment, one of the most deeply felt places of collective pain stems directly from America’s longstanding history of racial oppression. Indeed, in virtually every community, this pain can be easily seen in our personal anguish, relational estrangement, institutional injustice, and systemic harm. Our hope is to step into these places of pain, not in order to deepen these wounds, but to heal them through honest, collaborative, creative, and sustained practices of storytelling.
Our hope: Racial Healing
Why racial healing?
Our strategy: storytelling
Healing the racial wounds of our communities will require many things of us, but it begins with a new way of seeing. A new way of seeing the truth about ourselves and our neighbors, a new way of seeing the truth about the history we have together inherited, and a new way of seeing both the responsibilities and possibilities of our shared future. We believe that this new way of seeing can only come as we learn one another’s stories and let those stories transform both our understanding and our daily practice of life together.
Why storytelling?
Our Story: The Underground Railroad
The Underground Railroad—one of America’s earliest Civil Rights Movements—is a foundational story in the struggle for African American liberation. Its story offers a singular opportunity not only to shed light on America’s painful racial wounds, but also—through its distinctive emphasis on cross-border collaboration—to give insights on what healing those wounds will require of each of us.
Why the Underground Railroad?
Our Place: CHester County, PA + Surrounding areas
The story of the Underground Railroad is fused with the landscape of Chester County and the surrounding areas. Indeed, this area is to the Underground Railroad what Alabama is to the Civil Rights Movement: a geography of singular historical significance. This is the place to which people fled. This is the place in which they found welcome. This is the place in which they created new lives. This is the place from which they continued their long journey toward equality. This is the place where this story came into being. And yet even there, much of this story remains unknown. Because of this, we are committed to elevating the ways in which the story of the Underground Railroad—a story of global significance—is embedded in the landscape of our local community.
Why Chester County, Pennsylvania?
We are a team of scholars, artists, and activists specializing in African American history and driven by the conviction that true, transformative, and ongoing storytelling is foundational to the work of racial healing.
Meet the team
Robert Edwards
Scholar-in-Residence
Gregory Thompson
Co-Founder, Creative Director
Larycia Hawkins
Director of the Center for Public History
Henry Tarr
Researcher
Our Partners
Our work is supported by, and carried out in close collaboration with:
Lincoln University
Founded in 1854, Lincoln University is the nation’s first degree-granting Historically Black institution in the United States.
Pennsylvania Tourism Office
The Pennsylvania Tourism Office focuses on drawing outsiders in to experience all of the wonders that the great state of Pennsylvania has to offer.
Longwood Gardens
Longwood Gardens is one of the world’s great horticultural displays, encompassing 1,100 acres of dazzling gardens, woodlands, meadows, fountains, a 10,010-pipe Aeolian organ, and grand conservatory.
Square Roots Collective
Based in Kennett Square, PA, Square Roots Collective is a collection of enterprises: for-profit businesses, non-profit ventures, formal and informal partnerships, and associations with likeminded organizations – all united by our commitment to the thriving of Southern Chester County.
Andrew Mellon Foundation
The Mellon Foundation is a vigorous advocate for ideas and imagination, beauty and complexity, and the power of social justice in the arts, culture, and humanities.