A touring sculpture of abolitionist and civil legal rights activist Harriet Tubman was unveiled Saturday at King Elementary Faculty in Lancaster metropolis.
The Harriet Tubman’s “Journey to Freedom” traveling exhibit, which commenced its journey in Montgomery, Alabama, and has been touring because January 2020, will be on exhibit at the corner of South Duke Avenue and North Road by means of March 30.
The complete expense of the show, which consists of transportation of the sculpture, is approximately $7,000. It is designed possible by the Lancaster African American Cultural Alliance of Lancaster, Millersville University and an anonymous donor.
The 9-foot, 2,400-pound sculpture by North Carolina-based mostly, award-successful artist Wesley Wofford pays tribute to Tubman’s motivation to and resilience in the battle for freedom and depicts her travels to totally free hundreds of enslaved persons.
The sculpture exhibits Tubman as a younger lady keeping the hand of an enslaved female, top her to her flexibility on the Underground Railroad, leaving the bonds of slavery guiding. Their ft stand on a single rock, which symbolizes the slave states of Maryland and Delaware, though Tubman’s still left foot rises up around a cliff, symbolizing the risk of the journey on their way to Pennsylvania.
“At one particular point, the African American local community was concentrated in the southeast of the city. As much as King Elementary, this is the first university to be named just after a Black particular person right here, so this is the excellent spot for the show simply because it is here to signify we are continue to on this journey, we are still fighting the struggle to freedom and we are below to stay,” mentioned Vincent Derek Smith, president of the cultural alliance.
The sculpture was formally unveiled through a unique event at the faculty, 466 Rockland St., with dozens of folks in attendance.
“It’s enjoyable to see what this exhibit does for every community. It’s building bridges, it is inspiring communities to arrive with each other and it’s thrilling to see what it does in each individual location and how it impacts the people today. Harriet is an American hero and most importantly a part product, so we maintain hands with our Black brothers and sisters to tell that story. Which is the explanation we do this,” explained sculptor Wofford.
The unveiling party bundled remarks from clergy, local and condition officers a stay artwork set up by artist Bryan Hickman prayer songs and a presentation of “Living the Encounter: Underground Railroad Re-enactment,” ordinarily at Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church on Strawberry Street.
“The tale of Harriet is not the tale of one individual but the story of Black and brown men and women ideal here in the southeast, in our community,” mentioned state Rep. Izzy Smith-Wade-El.
“It’s a unique honor and it’s humbling to be celebrating Harriet Tubman with all of you currently,” stated Lancaster town Mayor Danene Sorace. “She survived so numerous obstructions in her existence and went on to be element of the suffrage movement for gals. We are celebrating history by way of the lens of a heroine, and to celebrate and understand a Black woman who accomplished so a lot is really an honor.”
Meanwhile, Rev. Edward M. Bailey of Bethel AME, in which he has been the pastor for the previous 28 a long time, reminded the viewers of largely African Us residents that the battle for freedom is not over.
“Anybody who thinks it is, is crazy,” Bailey claimed. “If you want to look for independence, no person is likely to set you totally free. You have to fight for it.”
Tubman was born Araminta Ross in 1822 on Maryland’s jap shore to enslaved mom and dad. She escaped to become a foremost abolitionist who aided the Underground Railroad, a key network of people, routes and harmless homes to transport enslaved individuals out of the South.
“We are continue to combating that journey to freedom as African Americans. It is also a particular wrestle mainly because we have to determine out who we are, the place we arrive from and settle for it to then be able to go ahead. That statue represents us as a culture … so we are likely to celebrate Black people today,” Smith reported.
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Harriet Tubman can help us work toward feminist, anti-racist and liberatory pedagogy in games—a vital need for the field.
Promotional image for “Freedom: The Underground Railroad—A Cooperative History Game,” created by Brian Mayer (2012), with art by Steven Paschal. (Reprinted with permission of Academy Games)
Editor’s note: Launching Tuesday, Feb. 1, and culminating on March 10, the Harriet Tubman Bicentennial Project pays tributeto this feminist icon with a special commemorative issue through Ms. online and in print. Explore the interactive groundbreaking site here.
What’s Harriet Tubman got to do with video games? While this pairing may seem strange, as game design educators we found impact in bridging these two subjects in our own classroom. Centering Tubman in our course has helped in our ongoing project to develop feminist and anti-racist game design education.
The commercial video games field has serious problems, including harmful representations of several marginalized groups (Daniels and LaLone, 83-97), exploitative and harassing labor practices in industry, and even toxic behavior between gamers within the play community. These problems, and the work of resisting them, have been researched by leading Black games scholars and designers such as Kishonna L. Gray, D. Fox Harrell, Tanya DePass, Lindsay Grace, and others.
Unfortunately, these problems, and specifically the issue of racism which we focus on here, is not confined to the industry or play experience, and further pervades the games classroom. These issues manifest in the classroom in multiple ways, including in the way that racism in games is often left uncritiqued, in the unspoken norms that allow culturally appropriative design methods to go unquestioned, and even in student interactions that lead to harassment of instructors who seek to push back against oppressive norms.
A View of the Nintendo Booth at the EB Games Expo 2015. (Wikimedia Commons)
As co-instructors for the Fall 2019 iteration of an undergraduate game design course at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (see our prior publication on the critical feminist pedagogy of this course), we focused on telling Tubman’s story through games. This became part of a community engagement collaboration with the Capital Region campuses of the University at Albany, RPI and Albany Law School, led by Janell Hobson, to celebrate the 170th anniversary of Tubman’s self-liberation from slavery in the fall of 1849 for a “pop-up” exhibition at a local art gallery.
We knew that focusing on Tubman for a game design course at a predominately white STEM institution would be potentially difficult and would certainly cause discomfort as we confronted the historical and current realities of racism and white supremacy. Despite a diverse representation of multiple racial identities throughout our class, we only had one Black student in the course. Most of our students were not aware of the lingering effects of the institution of slavery. As such, we created a classroom community built on mutual trust where students were comfortable taking risks and sharing vulnerably.
Building on approaches we had developed in earlier years (blending critical making and dialogic pedagogy to develop a transformative learning environment rooted in social justice education, as well as helping students develop skills for communicating across differences), our classroom dialogues allowed our students to authentically voice and process the discomfort they felt designing games about Tubman and slavery.
We looked at the brutality of slavery, and Black resistance and resilience, as we discussed course readings, such as Kate Clifford Larson’s Bound for the Promised Land, Sarah Bradford’s book written during Tubman’s own lifetime, and Sarah Juliet Laura’s research on portrayals of slavery and revolt in games. We also applied dialogic pedagogy to engage students in a review of existing slavery games, many that are problematic and perpetuate racism. We dissected why these games had negative impacts by examining specific ways they portrayed slavery in their artwork, story and mechanics.
“Heavy Weight – Arrival of a Party at League Island”, from William Still’s The Underground Railroad (1872), Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora.
We looked at a range of examples, including the board game Freedom (2012) by Brian Mayer, which is a good-faith attempt to represent the Underground Railroad and is packed with educational material. It is quite informative with the facts of this history but minimizes the affective experience of the game, as it encourages an intellectualizing mode of play. We also looked at poor examples, such as the infamous Playing History: Slave Trade video game (2013), sometimes referred to as “Slave Tetris,” which we examined as a racist misuse of games’ ability to make meaning from mechanics—a quality known as procedural rhetoric. In this game, players stack slave avatars into a slave ship in the same manner as blocks are stacked in the puzzle game Tetris.
While the game developers claimed this dehumanization was intentional on their part, to emphasize this aspect of slavery, we talked about the inappropriateness of placing the player in the role of racist oppressor in a game in which pleasure could be derived from succeeding in the puzzle task. We also discussed the game’s shortcomings in terms of representation, with character design reminiscent of the racist iconography of minstrelsy. Examining these examples in dialogue helped address the nature of the game designer’s responsibility, tensions around who has the right to tell another’s story, and both the pitfalls and potentials for use of games in anti-racist teaching.
Even after these dialogues, ultimately only four of the eight student games were selected for the public exhibition. This ‘success rate’ of 50 percent felt like an accurate reflection of the friction between our course and shortcomings in the games field. Despite our approach, not all students were able to create successful games honoring Tubman, given the weight of dominant racist practices in games and game design education. Successful teams, two of which we highlight here, found ways to bring critical curiosity to the story of Tubman, were open to receiving constructive feedback on improving their designs, and worked to fabricate their games to a higher level of polish.
Guided by Sarah E. Mirekua, Hibiki Takaku & Justin Hung. Guided is a cooperative game in which players take on the role of runaways and conductors on the Underground Railroad. The game is played blindfolded to simulate travel under cover of darkness, and uses musical codes for players to communicate. (Amy Corron)
What it gets right: Guided creates an affective experience for players that moves beyond the factual to incorporate sound and touch interaction between players, with an emphasis on the collaboration, trust, and ingenuity that was necessary for the Underground Railroad to succeed.
Family or Foe? by Anushka Potdar, Alfa Cao, & Sydney Stojkovic. Family or Foe? is a collaborative storytelling game in which players try to escape slavery together by moving on a historically accurate map of the U.S. from the 1850s to reach a free state. (Amy Corron)
What it gets right: Family or Foe? includes moldable clay-based pieces for players to shape into highly personalized pieces, increasing their attachment to characters. Asymmetrical balance in the gameplay makes escape exponentially more difficult in larger groups, meaning players are encouraged to go it alone, leaving friends and family behind, giving players a window into the emotionally wrenching experience of losing connections with others through the brutality of the slavery system.
The two other games exhibited, Safehouse and Combahee, are both turn-based strategy games supported by historical research. In Safehouse, players are either a freedom seeker or slave hunter, playing battleship-style to avoid capture. In Combahee, players control either the Union or Confederate forces, and re-enact the Civil War raid led by Tubman. However, as with Freedom (2012), these two student games similarly facilitated a more intellectualized mode of play that shied away from the personal or emotional.
As a group, these student games succeeded in facilitating player interaction and reflection on the brutality of the history of slavery in the U.S., and the resilience of those who resisted, such as Tubman and other freedom seekers who collaborated on the Underground Railroad. Unlike problematic slavery games, the students’ games addressed enslaved peoples’ lived experience in meaningful ways, offering a playing experience that invites reflection.
A common theme throughout all four games is the lack of ability to win in a conventional way—mirroring the reality that there is no way to win within the systems of slavery, racism and white supremacy. All games were designed for in-person, physical play, allowing for more dialogic interaction between players than is possible in the digital medium, also reflecting the pedagogical approach of the course. By highlighting the common erasure of this history from our culture, these games also pointed out the systemic entrenchment that slavery continues to have on our collective history and culture.
These student games succeeded in facilitating player interaction and reflection on the brutality of the history of slavery in the U.S., and the resilience of those who resisted, such as Tubman.
Looking back on the experience, we reached out to former students from the course and asked for their longer-term reflections. While some of our white male students found meaning in the course in terms of informational learning about Black history and developed a new communication skill in dialogue, a female student of color who responded to us discussed a more personal response to the course, noting that through dialogue she developed a deeper awareness of how her peers’ social identities influenced their perspectives. All students who responded to us shared that this was the only instance of an undergraduate course they took that focused on the Black experience or a Black historical figure. This indicates there is much work yet to do, not only in our courses but across the curriculum.
Bringing in complex, key figures from Black history may be a helpful strategy. We see how bringing Tubman into our course functioned as a generative catalyst, pushing many “buttons” of the games field in meaningful ways, shifting focus to a Black female figure, and helping our students critically explore how identity, specifically race and gender, and systems of oppression, such as slavery, show up in games and the dominant narratives that games can perpetuate.
Utilizing Tubman and her history as a hero and avatar throughout our course also helped our class explore new ways to conceive game design and move forward methods to teach the history of slavery through games that include women-led and Black-led point-of-views.
In a way, we see Tubman herself as having ‘come back’ for us too, to help us work toward feminist, anti-racist and liberatory pedagogy in games, a vital need for our field.
The essay series for the Harriet Tubman Bicentennial Project is as follows:
Michelle D. Commander, “Let Me Not Forget: Harriet Tubman’s Enduring Speculative Visions” | Feb. 2
