University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: November 11, 2005

By JESSICA KELTZ
Reporter Contributor

Keith Griffler moved from one Underground Railroad city to another this past summer, an environment that seems to suit his research, which centers on illuminating moments of hidden historical activity of African diaspora workers.

Keith Griffler, a new faculty member in the Department of African American Studies, moved from one Underground Railroad city—Cincinnati—to another—Buffalo—this past summer. Griffler has written a book on the Underground Railroad.
PHOTO: NANCY J. PARISI

"What has primarily motivated my research is interest in interrogating further some aspects of U.S. history that have been viewed primarily from a standpoint of white liberal agency in what we could broadly call the African-American liberation struggle," says Griffler, an associate professor in the Department of African American Studies, College of Arts and Sciences.

He and his wife, Janina Brutt-Griffler, an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education, both began teaching at UB this semester. Griffler comes to UB from the University of Cincinnati, located in a city that, like Buffalo, has a history of Underground Railroad activism.

"We were excited about the opportunity of moving to an internationally renowned university," he says.

Griffler has published two books on African-American history. The first, "What Price Alliance? Black Radicals Confront White Labor, 1918-1938," looks at the formation of the political alliance of African Americans and a labor movement that had previously been hostile toward them. The second, "Front Line of Freedom: African Americans and the Forging of the Underground Railroad in the Ohio Valley," explores the African-American origins of the Underground Railroad—origins that Griffler says have historically been overlooked in favor of a romanticized vision of white abolitionists secreting escaped slaves away to freedom.

After all, he points out, the true experience of the Underground Railroad was lived by the actual fugitives. And before they made it to the northern United States, they were helped almost exclusively by African Americans.

"But for some reason, we're fascinated by the false-bottomed carriages, the legends of tunnels, the garrets in old houses," he notes. "We're less fascinated by the African Americans who were the real points of contact."

Griffler's third book, which is in progress, mirrors themes from his Underground Railroad work. A comparative social history of African-American and southern African workers, the study aims to reconceptualize labor history in a way that integrates the history of African diaspora workers.

"Labor history has traditionally been conceptualized in a way that leads us to white workers," he says. "It has largely excluded workers of the African diaspora."

In looking back at the formative period of the labor movement, he says he wants to look into "hidden African-American agency there," as he did in his first book. "The traditional explanation was that a labor movement that was historically hostile to African Americans in the 1930s became interested in organizing and actively fighting for their rights on a national level," Griffler explains. His study showed that African Americans, not racially egalitarian white unionists, had been the prime movers in this transformation.

Implicit in the findings of his work on the Underground Railroad and the labor movement, he says, is the question of why those myths weren't detected and explored sooner.

"I think it is a natural impulse. It is natural to want to find a tradition of racial liberalism in a country that largely lacked one up through about the 1960s," Griffler adds.

"Historians are now turning more and more to the question of why—why was there almost a complete absence for long periods in our history of a strongly rooted, white liberal tradition on racial issues," he explains.

In addition to his two books, Griffler also co-wrote, co-produced and co-directed a national public television historical documentary called "Wade in the Water," for which he received a $30,000 grant from the National Black Programming Consortium. The documentary, which looks at the journeys of fugitive slaves traveling through the Ohio River valley, won a series of awards, including first place in the National Broadcasting Society's National Professional Production category in 2002.

While Griffler currently does not have any work on the Underground Railroad in progress, he says that topic is one that he hopes to pursue again in the future, especially since he's now living in an area that has such a rich tradition in that regard. "There's a lot of history left to be written," he says.

So far, Griffler says his transition to the Buffalo area has been a smooth one.

"It's certainly a beautiful area," he says. "We've been to Niagara Falls and we've done a little bit of exploring in the region."

Griffler, who earned a bachelor's degree in 1989 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a doctorate from Ohio State University in 1993, lives in Amherst. In his spare time, he enjoys running and discovering what he calls "Buffalo's lively arts scene."