For anyone who won’t or can’t forget the enduring consequences of slavery for the United States, standing on the banks of the Ohio River lends itself to contemplating how close and yet how far freedom must have seemed to generations of enslaved Louisvillians who gazed across the river to nearby Indiana, which entered the Union as a free state in 1816. To escape bondage, multitudes crossed that river, which is far less than a mile wide in some places. Some succeeded in getting to freedom, often with the help of Kentucky and Indiana’s thriving Underground Railroad. Others thought they had made it but were captured en route or returned as fugitives later, while many more died trying.
Until recently, however, no major public memorial in Kentucky acknowledged their striving, or indeed their existence at all. On June 19, 2021, those largely anonymous multitudes of Black lives diminished by the Ohio...
University of California Press