Underground Railroad Teaching Partnership of Long Island

Kathleen Velsor was born in Rochester, New York- an upstate stopping point on the Underground Railroad. She earned an undergraduate degree in Fine Arts and Education from Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Missouri, and received her Master's Degree in Educational Administration from Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and her Doctorate in Educational Research from The University of Cincinnati in Ohio. She has received numerous grants to research the Quaker involvement in the Underground Railroad on Long Island, most recent among them an education grant from the Long Island Community Foundation to establish the Underground Teaching Partnership to build community through interdisciplinary social studies workshops for school teachers.

Her research supporting the Underground Railroad has been published as an historical novel for young adult readers, Brother & Me (2005), Rosalie Ink. She is also published in four books- Friends in Freedom, the Underground Railroad in Queens, Long Island and Beyond (2006), The Road to Freedom (2001), a supplemental text for 7th graders, and Angel of Deliverance the Underground Railroad in Queens, Long Island (1999), all published by the Queens Historical Society. In spring 2004, her article "The Long Island Freedom Trail" vol.23. and in the spring 2009 "Sketch of the Life and Labors of Rev. Henry Highland Garnet: A Second Look vol.26 were published in the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society Journal.