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
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"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."
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