Chester County organization Voices Underground has plans to honor the county’s history through immersive storytelling, writes Emily Neil for WHYY.
Voices Underground features artists, scholars, and activists working to promote racial healing through creative arts, memorialization, and storytelling.
Currently, the organization plans to construct three separate memorial sites that tell the storied history of the Underground Railroad in Chester County. The sites will stretch across the geographical track many freedom seekers pursued, using the actual historical environment to tell the story of emancipation in the region.
One site will be located at Longwood Gardens, and will focus on the role of Quaker abolitionists during the emancipation movement. Another site, Lincoln University, will highlight Black abolitionists.
The third site, with a location that is yet to be finalized, will be a landscape scene located between Chester County and Delaware.
According to Voices Underground executive director LaNisha Cassell, the three-site structure will tell a comprehensive story that allows visitors to understand “that experience of going from enslavement to freedom.”
A 2021 audit of monuments across the country by Monument Labs found that a majority of national monuments honor white men exclusively. Co-founder Gregory Thompson shared that the goal of the upcoming memorial sites is to combat this inequity by enshrining an often-forgotten history and making the work of Black abolitionists the focus throughout.
According to Thompson, the project “will recover a story about cross-boundary collaborations for freedom that was at the heart of Chester County, and to tell those stories again at a time when we desperately need it.”
Read more about Voices Underground and the organization’s upcoming Underground Railroad memorial sites in WHYY.
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