By Carl Weiser
Enquirer Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON - The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center on Thursday announced separate $3 million contributions from two prominent business leaders, one black, one white.

The largest individual donations came from Black Entertainment Television founder Robert Johnson and former Procter & Gamble chairman John Pepper. Their pledges brought the museum's fund-raising to date to $91 million, just $19 million short of its goal.

Work on the Underground Railroad Freedom Center is picking up speed on Cincinnati's riverfront. In the next few weeks a third shift of workers is to be added. (Tony Jones photo) | ZOOM |

"This is a joyful day for me and for Francie," said Pepper, joined by his wife. "It's a joyful day for anyone who cares about the cause of freedom."

"We are coming together to tell a story with all its brutality, but all its triumph as well," said Johnson. "How could you not support an effort to get this story told?"

The Freedom Center, scheduled to open in summer 2004 on Cincinnati's riverfront, will be a Smithsonian-affiliated museum and "experience" aimed not just at telling the story of slaves' quest for freedom but also at encouraging visitors to come away more committed to it.

The estimated 250,000 annual visitors, for example, will step into an interactive theater in which they become immersed in a runaway slave's journey. They'll feel the water of the river, the rocking of the boat, "hear the guns firing and feel the bullets whiz by," said executive director Spencer Crew.

At the end, visitors will have a chance to answer questions - hard questions about what they would do to help others struggle for freedom. The goal, he said, is to have those visitors "leave with a sense of mission."

Crew, who previously ran the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, described the Freedom Center as part of a new generation of "museums of conscience," like Washington, D.C.'s Holocaust Memorial Museum, Los Angeles' Museum of Tolerance and Memphis' National Civil Rights Museum.

"You'll never know much it means to have something like this come to Cincinnati," said Francie Pepper, a Cincinnati native whose father frequently pointed out houses that had been stations on the underground railroad.

"It's using history to promote the future of freedom," she said.

The Underground Railroad refers to the 19th century movement that transported thousands of slaves to freedom. A network of abolitionists, both black and white, harbored runaway slaves in "stations" - houses, churches, barns - as the slaves made their way to the north or to Canada. The stretch of the Ohio River near Cincinnati was one of the major crossing points for the estimated 100,000 slaves who escaped from the south.

The Freedom Center's first Washington news conference coincides with an increasingly visible campaign to bring it to the nation's attention.

The Ad Council adopted the Freedom Center and is running $30 million worth of ads for it; Procter & Gamble included an ad for the center in its Sunday coupon inserts; and this month Kroger stores in Southwest Ohio, Northern Kentucky, southeastern Indiana and the Greater Miami Valley have erected educational banners, window posters and in-store displays to encourage customers to donate to the Freedom Center in honor of Black History Month.

Construction of the 158,000-square-foot, three-building complex on the riverfront began last June, after a groundbreaking ceremony attended by first lady Laura Bush.

After the news conference, the Freedom Center hosted a lunch at the National Press Club for supporters, including civil rights crusader and former National Council of Negro Women president Dorothy Height and Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee, D-Texas.

Pepper, of Wyoming, retired from Cincinnati-based consumer products giant Procter & Gamble in 2002 after 38 years.

Johnson was listed by Black Fortune magazine as the richest black in the United States, worth $1.5 billion.

E-mail cweiser@gns.gannett.com