Madison Courier www.madisoncourier.com 9/7/2007 3:00:00 PM

Breitweiser to attend Underground Railroad national conference Pat Whitney Courier Staff Writer Jae Breitweiser of Eleutherian College in Lancaster will be among Hoosiers instrumental in preserving the history of the Underground Railroad who will attend the Friends of the Network to Freedom Association's first national conference next week. The conference will be at Georgetown College in Georgetown, Ky. "This is the first Underground Railroad conference to ever be assembled in our area," said Breitweiser, who was invited to join the group and plan for the event nearly a year ago. "People all over the U.S. trying to preserve the history of the Underground Railroad in their communities will be present, providing an opportunity for us all to pull together and understand what our focus needs to be to keep this effort afloat." The conference theme is "Looking Back, Moving Forward." Other Hoosiers who will attend are Donna Stokes-Lucas, president of Indiana Freedom Trails; Janice McGuire from the Levi Coffin House in Fountain City; Elizabeth Osborn of the Indiana Supreme Court's "Courts in the Classroom Programs"; and Pam Peters, author of "The Underground Railroad in Floyd County, Indiana." All will participate on panels at the conference. Breitweiser and Stokes-Lucas are advisory board members of the Network to Freedom Association. The conference keynote speaker will be Harvard School Law professor Charles Ogletree, who founded the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard. Special guests will include Robert George Stanton, former director of the National Park Service, who was raised in a former slave settlement in Texas, and Queen Quet, Chieftess of the Gullah-Geechee Nation who is a writer, lecturer and historian who travels the world telling the story of her historic homeland on the lower East Coast. The five-day conference Sept. 10-15 will include National Park Service workshops, bus tours of the Kentucky Underground Railroad and Abraham Lincoln sites, and round table discussions of Underground Railroad issues of historic and contemporary interest. The cost to attend the conference is $85, which includes admission to all lectures, performances and events. The purpose of the Friends of the Network to Freedom Association is to generate expertise, education and commemoration of the Underground Railroad story nationally and internationally. Indiana Freedom Trails is a group working to locate, identify, preserve and promote Indiana's Underground Railroad history. The Network to Freedom Association advocates and supports the National Park Service National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Program. Georgetown College established the Underground Railroad Research Institute in 2001 to promote education and cultural understanding. Alicestyne Adams, the institute's director, also is president of the National Network to Freedom Association. For more information about the conference, visit www.ugrri.org or www.indianafreedomtrails.org.