What I’m Reading: ‘The Underground Railroad’

Although I am almost exclusively a nonfiction reader, I made an exception for Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (Doubleday, 2016), a novel about a slave in Georgia who embarks on a quest for her freedom.

Truth be told, I was late to the party, having picked up the book after it won a Pulitzer Prize and was selected for Oprah’s Book Club. As I was reading the novel, Whitehead agreed to deliver the 125th-anniversary lecture at the institution I lead, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. So, I had unreasonably high expectations. I was not disappointed.

As a relative newcomer to the South, but someone familiar with the slave narrative in literature, I was struck by the inventiveness of the storytelling and its chilling resonance. As we wrestle with issues of free speech and campus climate, it’s important to remember why freedom matters and to reconcile our nation’s past — and future. A group of 40 Greensboro students made connections between events in the novel and current issues raised by Black Lives Matters and other civil-rights organizations when they spoke to Whitehead before his talk.

In his acknowledgments, the author thanks the university’s Digital Library on American Slavery, a project that for 25 years has worked to uncover and publish the names of those held in bondage. The lesson I took from this is that universities must continue to support and invest in such research. It serves our students, helps inform our society, and provides the data and insight that enable students, scholars, and award-winning authors to examine our world and enrich our lives.

Franklin D. Gilliam Jr. is chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.