Thank you for your excellent continuing coverage of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. The theme of your thoughtful article in Sunday's Enquirer on June 13 ("Museum's first job: Explain what it is") - was especially well-chosen, and the comments by community historians and passersby were illuminating. I would like to add my thoughts on how the Freedom Center's successful mission might be achieved.

Ladon Spencer, 27, is quoted in the article: "Is [the Freedom Center] just about slavery? Nobody wants to see that slavery stuff."

In book signings throughout Cincinnati and the rest of the state, Henry Burke and I observed this as often to be true as was the opposite. Slavery is a polarizing subject: people are either extremely interested or they don't even want to think about it.

But the Freedom Center is not essentially about slavery. It's about the escape from slavery, and how compassionate, courageous black and white people working together made escape possible - and how in doing so they helped end slavery in the United States.

I feel strongly that the success of the Freedom Center also depends on collaboration: with people like Henry and with, as Cleveland State professor Edward Hill puts it, the "African-American museums popping up all over the place." There are several reasons for this.

For one thing, the Freedom Center has very few historical artifacts and can offer, even with excellent audio-visual presentations, only a limited sense of the breadth and scope of the Underground Railroad and the harrowing experience of running for your life from one of the most evil conditions ever engaged in by mankind (and still practiced in a number of ways around the world).

On the other hand, community history and diligent research have combined to reveal hundreds of places where thousands of fascinating life and death stories took place on the Underground Railroad. This is where, and why, those museums Spencer spoke of are "popping up all over the place."

What all of these museums and events require to become more effective - in many cases, just to survive - is a little financial help. Professional guidance and a pittance, compared with the Freedom Center's annual budget - or perhaps "just" assistance from a Freedom Center grant writer - could in many cases help the best of these local institutions become self-sustaining. But what do they have to do with the Freedom Center and its own long-term survival?

Think of the Freedom Center as the mother ship, lacking the historical resources and real-life ambience of the actual sites, while providing the professionalism and prestige that can garner funding to operate the whole system. So, think of the Freedom Center's partial funding or grant-writing assistance for the best of the local sites and events as investments in its own future.

Think of all the fliers and brochures and posters promoting the Freedom Center available at all those local sites the Freedom Center has sanctioned as being authentic, attractive and most likely to drive traffic back to the mother ship.

More important, imagine all the dedicated people who have, in some cases, spent years tracking down Underground Railroad stories and authenticating sites now enthusiastically encouraging their visitors to make the Freedom Center their final stop - as opposed to the envy and resentment of the Freedom Center's funding that currently make many of these local Underground Railroad enthusiasts anything but cheerleaders.

The extraordinary undertaking that was the Underground Railroad has inspired the development of well-organized networks of many such people throughout the country.

In their victorious struggle to make the Freedom Center a reality, its board and staff have not always taken into account the great potential value to the Freedom Center's mission that these established organizations, historical sites and museums offer.

Now, with fund-raising and construction nearing completion, it's time for the Freedom Center to reach out and acknowledge them. To utilize their years of dedication and experience, perhaps even to include them or their work among the changing programs and exhibits at the Freedom Center.

I'm not saying these suggestions constitute the Freedom Center's only path to success or that they will resolve all its financial difficulties. But collaboration, after all, is the mighty engine that made the Underground Railroad possible.

Dick Croy lives in Blue Ash and is the co-author with Henry Burke of "The River Jordan: A True Story of the Underground Railroad," a Foreword Magazine book-of-the-year nominee in 2002.