The Film: Interview Transcripts: Diane Miller

Diane Miller, coordinator, National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom,
National Park Service, on
documenting Underground Railroad stories
Many traditional historians and historic preservationists have tended to discount oral traditions.  But we find that it’s actually central to uncovering the history of the Underground Railroad, and it’s really the first place to look.  What is the oral tradition in the community and what is the oral tradition in the family?  Which is not to say that you don’t want to analyze it, determine what the source of the tradition was originally, how close can you get it back to the events.  Are there details in the oral tradition that you can corroborate through other sources, like census records or tax records, or diaries or letters?  In any case, it’s too important and you absolutely cannot count it out.  You have to look at oral tradition as a central piece of information. 

People often say the Underground Railroad was a secret activity and, therefore, you can’t document it, and you can’t know about it, and it’s largely myth and fiction, and we’re finding that’s not particularly true.  It’s very labor intensive to document it, and you have to be creative about it, you have to piece it together almost as if you were a detective, but information is out there.  It’s out there in court cases in the oral traditions, it’s out there in letters and diaries and journals that are still in the hands of the descendants of these people.  It’s in old newspapers.  There is information out there.

It is a difficult situation with the Underground Railroad to be able to preserve the history and the stories of the people that were involved, when so many of them no longer have sites that are there.  So many of the sites have been destroyed or altered beyond recognition.  So, in the Network to Freedom Program, we do not require that the building still be there in order to recognize a location. 

However, I think it’s important to preserve the sites that we do have left, where this history happened, because there’s nothing that compares to walking in the places where these people walked and looking at the landscape and seeing where it happened to really get an appreciation of the story and what it must have been like and so, it’s very important to preserve that piece of our past. 

the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom

freedom and the quest
for human rights