Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and political commentator Eugene Robinson will be the keynote speaker at the Underground Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania’s “Quest for Freedom” fundraising gala. The longtime Washington Post columnist authored his fourth book in 2026, Freedom Lost, Freedom Won: A Personal History of America.

The book chronicles his family’s well-documented past to demonstrate how African American history is an essential strand of the larger American narrative—from his great-great-grandfather’s liberation from slavery through his own coming of age during the Civil Rights Movement and beyond.

“The conspiracy of good engineered by Pennsylvania’s Underground Railroad leaders—including William Still, Martin Delany, Stephen Smith and William Whipper—helped write one of the most inspiring and compelling chapters in American history,” says Robinson. “Preserving these achievements in a museum environment not only cements their legacies, it celebrates the mark left by thousands of Pennsylvanians whose response to slavery was, ‘This stops here.'”