University community celebrates Harriet Tubman’s legacy with fifth annual commemoration event
The fifth annual Harriet Tubman Day commemoration was held by the University of Maryland’s Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies on Monday, March 10. The event celebrated Tubman’s legacy in the David C. Driskell Center.
According to Associate Professor Michelle Rowley, the commemoration event came to life shortly after the department was renamed the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. The intention was not only to honor Tubman by name, but also to commit to celebrating her legacy.
“A number of us in the department have incorporated Harriet Tubman into our syllabi, but this commemoration is an opportunity for us to reflect as a department and with our larger communities within and beyond the walls of the university,” Rowley said.
The theme for this year’s commemoration, organized by Rowley, was “Wild Futures: Taking Flight.” The event invited participants to explore the role of ecology and the environment in the experience of escaping slavery. It also examined the concept of “wildness” and its relationship to the concept of freedom.
In an effort to involve the campus community, the department partnered with the Department of Art to have students compete to create the promotional poster for the event. The student awarded the opportunity this year was Jayla Ross.
Ross’s poster design was inspired by Black history and the ways in which it appears in nature. In her artist statement, she described how she imagined the journey of emancipation and the influence it had on her design.
“For this commemoration, I wanted to emphasize Harriet Tubman’s incredible impact, even in her physical absence in the poster,” said Ross. “Enslaved individuals who sought freedom had to spend their days and nights restlessly traversing the unforgiving obstacles of the natural world…Yet, the North Star lit the night, making the path to freedom slightly clearer.”
The event hosted a variety of guest speakers, including Tubman’s great-great grandniece, Ernestine “Tina” Wyatt. Other speakers included culinary historian Leni Sorenson, esteemed authors and academics like Edda Black-Fields and artist Zoë Charlton.
When choosing speakers, Rowley said she heavily researched several individuals before contacting those whose work she felt reflected the ideas central to this year’s event.
“Once there’s a theme in place and there’s a clear sense of what the questions are, then I begin to think in terms of the disciplinary entry point. ‘Are we going to think through the lens of art?’, ‘Are we going to think through the lens of history?’” Rowley said.
To Rowley, the day was about community and conversation, bringing people together to honor Tubman’s legacy.
“I like to think of her day as a day where we are in community with each other, thinking deeply about a set of questions,” said Rowley. “We gather to think about these issues, and the speakers are simply the individuals who are in conversation with us about the questions that are on the table.”
Wyatt spoke to the audience about the experience of connecting with her family history, particularly Tubman, through faith.
“Connecting with Aunt Harriet’s faith has allowed me to feel I know her very well, and always on her mind was faith, freedom, family and friends,” Wyatt said.
Wyatt also shared her perspective on Tubman’s legacy and the idea of taking flight toward freedom.
“The idea of taking flight was not only in learning how to read the landscapes and the heavens, but also the preparation of and freeing her mind,” Wyatt said. “You see, her mind became free much earlier than her body.”