A state task force recommends Illinois do more to highlight its history with the “Underground Railroad” and honor those involved.

“More freedom seekers came through Illinois, Indiana and Ohio than ever went up the East Coast,” said Dr. Larry McClellan of the Illinois State Historical Society. “But that set of stories has never been fully told.”

Prior to the Civil War, escape from slavery didn’t necessarily mean freedom. Federal law at the time required Americans to send escaped slaves back south. That didn’t stop some from creating secret networks to help escaped slaves reach Canada, including many in Illinois.

Illinois Sen. Dave Koehler and Illinois Rep. Debbie Meyers-Martin co-chair the Illinois Underground Railroad Task Force, which issued its recommendation for ongoing support of work to identify and commemorate people fleeing slavery through the Underground Railroad in the state and the Illinoisians who helped them. The task force also recommended including the stories of these people in Illinois schools and promoting related tourism.

The railroad’s network of people and locations helped what historians call “freedom seekers” get to Canada. The Underground Railroad was comprised of “conductors,” who helped freedom seekers and the places where they sought refuge.

Harriet Tubman is perhaps the most famous conductor on the Underground Railroad and is commemorated on U.S. coins and postage stamps. She operated in Maryland, but the railroad ran through here in Illinois and throughout the Midwest as well.

“If I didn’t know about it, I wondered how many other people didn’t know about it and would be fascinated,” said Tazwell County Clerk John Ackerman, who helped spearhead the task force during a conversation with Sen. Koehler about the work done in Tazewell County to commemorate the Underground Railroad.

Ackerman came across references to the railroad while doing family genealogical research. He had only heard of the Underground Railroad “out east.”

Ackerman worked with Susan Rynerson, president of the Tazewell County Genealogical and Historical Society, and the Rev. Marvin Hightower, president of the Peoria NAACP, to identify 25 individuals in Tazewell County who had been conductors on the Underground Railroad and to place markers at their graves.

To learn about and promote work on the Underground Railroad statewide, Koehler introduced legislation to create the task force, which met throughout 2024 and delivered its final report on Nov. 12.

David Joens, director of the Illinois State Archives in 2024 and member of the task force, said, “One [goal is] just to bring public awareness that the Underground Railroad is pretty vibrant here in Illinois.”

“One of the biggest eye openers for me — for this whole project — was all the stuff that’s out there,” Joens said. “People are putting together videos, they’re writing books, they’re doing papers, they’re doing all kinds of research in depth.”

In the 1970s, Dr. McClellan of the Historical Society was on the faculty at Governors State University, located 30 miles south of Chicago, when he first encountered references to the Underground Railroad in Black communities in the Chicago suburbs. That led to decades of research on the subject culminating in the book “Onward to Chicago: Freedom Seekers and the Underground Railroad in Northeastern Illinois.”

“In Chicago, particularly with the Chicago Tribune, you get into the 1850s and the Underground Railroad in Northern Illinois is an open secret, and so the Chicago Tribune has hundreds of articles about the activities of the Underground Railroad,” McClellan said.

Koehler said the next step is to pass legislation to form the Illinois Freedom Trails Commission. Co-chairs Koehler and Meyers-Martin plan to introduce a bill in the spring legislative session.

If the legislation passes, the commission would work to enact the recommendations of the task force. That would include connecting work on the Underground Railroad within Illinois to work in other states and to the National Park Service’s Network to Freedom, a national network of more than 800 Underground Railroad sites.

McClellan said these stories have relevance today as America works through issues of race. “One of the reasons why freedom seeker stories and railroad stories are so important is because it’s reminding us — you know, believe it or not — there was a time in the middle, early 19th century where White families and Black families were really working together.”

To read the Illinois Underground Railroad Task Force report go to dnr.illinois.gov
To learn about Park Service’s Network to Freedom go to nps.gov