Underground Railroad

For decades, Martha Suggs-Spencer has carried history not just in boxes and binders, but in memory and lived experience. Spencer, founder of the now-closed James Douglas Suggs Underground Railroad Museum in Vandalia and co-creator of the long-running Freedom Festival with her late husband, Willie Lee King Spencer, has spent most of her life preserving stories others might overlook. Stories of family, freedom and survival passed down orally through generations. Born into a family shaped by migration, segregation and endurance, Spencer traces her devotion to history back to her father, James Douglas Suggs, a traveling musician in the Rabbit Foot Minstrel Show, [...]