Self-described history lover Chandra Pointer came out to a public meeting about the proposed Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad New York Corridor to make sure she was heard.
She doesn’t want Black people — their experiences, their presence and their present — left out, she said.
“It’s like we’re second-class citizens to the story of our history,” said Pointer, a 19th Ward resident. Too often, she said, the accounts of enslaved Black people are told from the perspectives of white abolitionists. The stories of Black Rochesterians are sometimes noticeably absent from tours and museums and places marked on maps, she said.
What about the Black folks in Rochester and New York at large — beyond Frederick Douglass — who lived here, helped enslaved people escape and escaped themselves, Pointer wondered. Will there be a place for their points of view in this project? What about their connections to the Black people of Rochester now?
Roughly 50 people gathered Monday evening at Legacy Drama House in Rochester’s Beechwood neighborhood to hear from the planners of the corridor and tell those planners their hopes and expectations for the 500-mile route that, if it becomes a reality, would connect historic sites to increase tourism and improve the public’s understanding of how some enslaved people reached freedom before the Civil War.