Photo By Cameron Knight

Anyone who'd link Carl Lindner with Harvey Milk or Steven Reece with Mahatma Gandhi has some explaining to do. What the prudish Cincinnati tycoon, the country's first openly gay officeholder, the Bond Hill banquet hall owner and the champion of Indian independence have in common is that they're "freedom heroes" by declaration of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.

But that's not their full title. They've been named Everyday Freedom Heroes, a term both self-contradictory -- aren't heroes, by definition, extraordinary? -- and revelatory. The Freedom Center puts great stock in being "for all people," as Executive Director Spencer Crew puts it. But on a subject as inherently controversial as human liberty, a museum risks being so universal in its appeal that it has no particular distinction.

It gets even better, or worse. Lindner, Gandhi et al. have a fuller title still. They are, to be precise, Kroger Everyday Freedom Heroes. The giant grocery corporation has acquired the naming rights for the Dalai Lama, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other notables from human history.

Which leads to one of the valid criticisms of this splendidly well-intentioned new institution: It softens its message in order to appeal to a broad range of donors. Funding sources include Procter & Gamble, the federal government, Oprah Winfrey and the city of Cincinnati. What could be more mainstream?

But the early indications are promising, as the center is trying hard to be relevant. One of its films mentions in passing the labor union movement, women's suffrage, Hispanic immigration and gay rights. Passing mention is a start, but only that.

One could nit-pick. An artful animation on the theme of "un-freedom" is marred by misspellings of "perseverance" and Bernard Malamud's last name. Malamud is quoted, "The purpose of freedom is to create it for others." True enough. The purpose of a museum is to elevate discussion and understanding; attention to detail is important. Spell-check, please.

The museum will be faulted for glossing over the brutality of American slavery. Slave shackles and offensive signs from the Jim Crow Era ("Colored Waiting Area") assault the senses and sensitivities. Yet there's something troubling about the premise of the Freedom Center. Commemorating the good deeds of the Underground Railroad begs the question of the evil it ameliorated.

Nate Livingston recently took a tour of the Freedom Center, apparently breaching the downtown entertainment boycott that he claims to support, and came away unimpressed.

"It trumpets the Underground Railroad's successes while downplaying the grim stories of the runaway slaves who were caught, beaten and killed while trying to escape," he writes.

Livingston tends to be annoying in part because, while opposing almost everything, he often has a kernel of truth on his side. By design, the Freedom Center is not a memorial of atrocity. When one thinks of the Jewish Holocaust, one thinks of unmitigated tragedy. The museums and memorials dedicated to the Shoah rightly emphasize the cruelty and the madness, the inhumanity of Nazi oppression.

One cannot visit the Freedom Center without being moved by the images of families split up and parceled out for sale, torture inflicted on those who dared to try to escape. But the overall thrust of the Freedom Center is upbeat, inviting, a tribute to freedom movements.

Unanswered is the question of whether the United States has sufficiently mourned the holocaust of its human bondage. Has white America ever listened to what the slave industry did and how it continues to affect the lives of its descendants 140 years later?

Without first wallowing in the depravity of slavery, emphasizing the handful of rescuers in the Underground Railroad is premature -- cheap grace.

The museum doesn't help its own cause when it lapses into the kind of grandiloquence that ends up sounding goofy, referring, for example, to the Ohio River as "the sacred river" or identifying itself as the "crown jewel of a $2 billion redevelopment of Cincinnati's central riverfront." That kind of commercialization is hardly suited to skeptical observers who want to know why Cincinnati should be allowed to host a national institution on the theme of racial equality. Cincinnati?

The museum takes pains to identify with the city. Artifacts include the flag of the Cincinnati Black Brigade in the Civil War. A slavery timeline notes that Cincinnati was home to Harriet Beecher Stowe when she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, the book Lincoln himself credited with starting the war.

Sometimes the local references seem to clash. "Even though the African Americans north of the Ohio River were free, they faced harassment and persecution from Cincinnati's pro-slavery majority," one exhibit notes.

Yet Crew told The New York Times that Cincinnati was a refuge for escaped slaves: "People looking for freedom could look across the river, and once they got here could melt into the population and not be recaptured by those who were pursuing them."

But hometown pride doesn't keep the museum from highlighting the slimy side of Cincinnati's heritage. The timeline lists the 1836 mob attack on James Birney's abolitionist newspaper in Cincinnati and the race riots that killed many blacks in Cincinnati in 1841.

Then, without special attention, appears a sign that points to why Cincinnati is precisely the place for such a museum. With the kick of ancient premonition, the sign seems to describe Cincinnati today, although its origin is Boston 150 years ago.

Photo By Cameron Knight

Cincinnati has never been far from the freedom struggle.

"Caution!" the sign proclaims. "Colored people of Boston, one and all, you are hereby respectfully cautioned and advised to avoid conversing with the watchmen and police officers of Boston, for since the recent order of the mayor and aldermen, they're empowered to act as kidnappers and slave catchers."

Change "Boston" to "Cincinnati" and "slave catchers" to "racial profilers," and you get a stronger sense of the fitness of the museum's location.

The dedication of the Freedom Center will be proceeded by a protest and the launching of an alternative institution, the People's Freedom Center: A Living Museum of the Missing Pages of History and Contemporary Struggle. Pardon the endless subtitle; earnest liberals talk that way.

But in opposing the official institution -- remember this is the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center -- the oppositionists pay tribute to the very spirit that the fancy institution aims to honor: the few who, throughout history, have sacrificed for freedom's sake, accepting the cost of doing what's right.

Why Cincinnati? Why now? Not because we deserve it. Because we need it. ©