cover image Through Darkness to Light: Photographs Along the Underground Railroad

Through Darkness to Light: Photographs Along the Underground Railroad

Jeanine Michna-Bales. Princeton Architectural, $40 (192p) ISBN 978-1-61689-565-5

In the foreword to this photo collection, civil rights activist Andrew Young writes, “The Underground Railroad has been described as the first civil rights movement... because it blurred racial, gender, religious, and socioeconomic lines and united people... in the common cause of ending the injustice of slavery.” This long photographic essay by photographer Michna-Bales documents the sites that made up the network’s route north and is intended to “illuminate the darkened corners” of this episode in American history. Historians estimate that in the six decades preceding the Civil War, more than 75,000 freedom seekers passed through the Underground Railroad’s stations, but this remarkable movement has slipped into the “realm of myth and quaint folktale,” notes historian Fergus Bordewich in an essay describing the historical facts of the journey. Sadly, many of the 80-plus photographs, which were taken at night in hopes of capturing the “mystery and foreboding” that the runaways must have felt on their journey north, lack visual interest due to the darkness in which they were shot and their presentation on the page. Color photos. (Feb.)