Welcome to Karen Hunter is awesome.

I am Karen Hunter, and in this space, actually my whole life, I'm committed to making

sure that we know some things, that we tell the truth, that we hold things up to the light,

that we get to the bottom of them.

And this next guest, Dr. Cheryl LaRoche, has been doing this work for way longer than I've been doing it,

has been doing this work for a long time.

She is an archaeologist.

And she also wrote a book, The Apostle of Liberation, AME Bishop Paul Quinn and the Underground Railroad,

and I did not put it all together until we talk with her, that each stop, each stop,

a lot of the stops were AME churches, and that was on purpose.

So up next, my discussion, part one, with with Dr. Cheryl LaRoche. Reverend Dr.

Otis Moss III is my partner in power today and we are joined by a professor in historic preservation.

She is out in them streets as an archaeologist researching the physical exploring of the landscapes

of the 18th and 19th centuries of free black

communities and primarily also looking at the pathway of the Underground Railroad and the stops

along the way. Let me welcome Dr. Cheryl LaRoche to the Karen Hunter Show. Hi.

Hi. It's great to be here. Thank you. Good to see you. Good to have you here.

Before we get into all of the work, how did you stumble upon this? You know, I first came across the

Underground Railroad when I was working as a archaeological conservator, conserving some faces that were in the

basement of a church.

And after we got the faces, they were carved in mud and sort of in the foundation of the building,

we cut them out, preserve them, and sent them to Cornell University.

...