I agree, it would be a shame to have our whole memory of slavery be the story
of white people who helped escaped slaves.  However, from my perspective, the
fact that a few white people did so does not ease a painful and contradictory
past.  Instead it forces us to confront that all white people had that
option, yet only a few exercised it.

It would be a shame if as historians of New York we erased our state's
slaveowning past to focus on the slightly later period when a few white New
Yorkers opposed slavery.

Jane Holzka