• PhD Ohio State University, History, 1993
• MA Ohio State University, History, 1990
• BA (Summa Cum Laude), University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, History, 1989

Keith Griffler, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Africana and American Studies who joined the department in 2005 and served as chair from 2008 to 2016 and interim chair in 2022. A specialist in the history of the Black liberation struggle, his research and teaching span a broad range of topics in the history and political economy of Africa and its diaspora, together with the historical investigation of the nexus of race, gender and class in the making of the modern world.

His most recent book is The Freedom Movement's Lost Legacy: Black Abolitionism since Emancipation (published in 2023), the first historical account of the Black freedom movement's response to modern slavery in the twentieth century. In the century after emancipation, the long shadow of slavery left African Americans well short of the freedom promised to them. While sharecropping and debt peonage entrapped Black people in the South, European colonialism had bred a new slavery that menaced the liberty of even more Africans. A core group of Black freedom movement leaders, including Ida B. Wells and W. E. B. Du Bois, followed their nineteenth-century predecessors in insisting that the continuation of racial slavery anywhere put Black freedom on the line everywhere. They even predicted the consequences that ignited the recent nationwide Black Lives Matter movement—the rise of a prison industrial complex and the consequent erosion of African Americans' faith in the criminal justice system.

Professor Griffler details how the mainstream international antislavery movement became complicit in the enslavement of Black and brown people across the world through its sponsorship of racist international antislavery law that gave the "new slavery" explicit legal sanction. Black freedom movement activists, thinkers, and organizers did more than call out this breathtaking betrayal of abolitionist principles: they dedicated themselves to the eradication of slavery in whatever forms it assumed on the global stage and developed an expansive vision of human freedom. This timely and important work reminds us that the resurgence of today's Black freedom movements is a manifestation and continuation of the traditions and efforts of these early Black leaders and abolitionists—an important chapter in the history of antislavery and the ongoing Black freedom struggle.

His other books include Front Line of Freedom: African Americans and the Forging of the Underground Railroad in the Ohio Valley, a history of the African American front line communities in the port cities and towns along the Ohio which gave the impetus for the formation and growth of the region’s underground freedom movement. Published in 2004, it introduced a new and influential perspective on an antebellum institution that continues to exert a powerful hold on the nation’s imagination. It gives a battlefield-level view of the decades-long war against American slavery along one of its frontlines, the Ohio River, the longest commercial dividing line between slavery and freedom. In shifting the focus from the traditional emphasis placed on support operations in the rear—the “stations” along routes used to conduct fugitives through the free states to Canada—it recenters the history of the Underground Railroad onto the African American frontline communities in the port cities and towns along the Ohio which gave the impetus for the formation and growth of the region’s underground freedom movement. Based on a careful reading of the historical record, it restores the full context in which America’s first successful interracial freedom movement played out, as much a struggle to transform the states North of the Ohio as those to its south. In a climate of racial proscription, mob violence, and a white public hostile to their presence, the efforts of Ohio Valley African Americans to establish and maintain viable communities became inextricably linked to the steady stream of fugitives from southern bondage who crossed through the region. By rendering the role of African Americans visible, Front Line of Freedom simultaneously sketches the contours of what became an interracial struggle against slavery, demonstrating collaboration at every level of the enterprise. As it traces the efforts of African Americans to free themselves, it provides a window into the process by which the clandestine network extending from the Ohio far inland took shape and grew into a powerful force in antebellum America.

Professor Griffler is currently completing The Invisible Trail to Freedom: A Freedom Seeker’s View of the Underground Railroad, which argues that approaching the history of the fugitive solely or even mainly through the optic of the stationary northern Underground Railroad gets us only part of the way to unlocking the deeper meaning of this iconic chapter of American history. To get a complete picture, we must combine the stationary northern perspective with that of the mobile point of view of the freedom seekers themselves, traveling with the people who embarked from the South as they made their way north. Following freedom seekers on their journey northward—or wherever it took them—helps reveal their hidden world. Our knowledge of the Underground Railroad depends on understanding freedom seekers, and that requires an appreciation of the crucial role of family and community, of the skills and knowledge on which runaways relied to reach free soil, on the conditions of life as a refugee in both the North and Canada, and the extension of the resistance of the community of enslaved into the exile to which runaways escaped. Journeying with the freedom seeker reveals the long freedom trail they traversed, the remarkable minds they possessed, and the bonds they maintained with those who remained behind. The phenomenon of individual escape must be understood in a larger context and not simply as an end in itself. The multifaceted freedom seeker movement that lay behind what we know as the Underground Railroad is usefully holistically viewed as the collective as well as individual resistance of the enslaved to slavery and racism. This phase of the centuries long African American freedom movement featured the organization of the enslaved community as a kind of underground resistance movement sharing features in common with the similar ones formed by occupied and colonial nations of resisting an armed occupier while being positioned as the racial/ethnic/national/colonial other.

Prof. Griffler co-wrote, co-produced and co-directed a historical documentary, “Wade in the Water,” which looks at the journeys of fugitive slaves traveling through the Ohio Valley. The documentary won a number of national awards, including first place in the National Broadcasting Society’s National Professional Production category in 2002. He serves on the Advisory Board of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. His work has been funded by a Charles Phelps Taft Fellowship and a major grant from the Ohio Historical Society.