Swing Low: A Visual Metaphor for Abolition Now
Alison Saar’s Harlem statue of Harriet Tubman is a testament to the Black Feminist imagination – a force that has led the current global push towards police and prison abolition.
Written by: Amelia Simone Herbert
harriet
if i be you
let me not forget
to be the pistol
pointed
to be the madwoman
at the river’s edge
warning
be free or die
- Lucille Clifton
Standing at the intersection of St. Nicholas Avenue, West 122nd Street, and Eighth Avenue (Frederick Douglass Boulevard) in Harlem, facing north, a keen observer is confronted with a striking snapshot of the United States political landscape.
In the foreground, you stand face to face with a memorial of renowned abolitionist Harriet Tubman. Currently the only monument dedicated to a Black woman in the 5 boroughs of New York City, Swing Low was created by Alison Saar and unveiled in 2008. The towering bronze figure draws your eyes toward the sky, momentarily convincing you that a statue could stand as large as Tubman’s life. She wears a long skirt decorated with anonymous faces rendered in the style of West African “passport masks", symbolizing the many people she guided to freedom. Trailing from her skirt is a tuft of long, tangled tree roots, each planted firmly in the ground. Mainstream culture has repeatedly tried to claim Tubman’s unruly narrative, most recently with a blockbuster film and a twenty dollar bill, the same amount her father paid to free her mother. But, as historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar argues in She Came to Slay, the half is never really told about this abolitionist, suffragist, disabled, outlaw, “madwoman” who dared to imagine an impossible world and lived it into existence well into her 90s. Last week marked the 157th anniversary of the Combahee River Raid, a Tubman-led expedition that delivered nearly 800 people from slavery. Carried out June 1 and 2, 1863, it included strategic and coordinated destruction of property along South Carolina’s coast, with the purpose of weakening Confederate forces and the institution of chattel slavery.
Photo of Harriet Tubman Memorial, Swing Low, in Harlem via jag9889 on Flickr.
As you linger at Harlem’s bustling "Harriet Tubman Triangle,” and gaze at this monument to the inextinguishable force of human freedom, a sharply contrasting structure comes abruptly into focus. It is the 28th precinct of the New York City Police Department, a gray-brown concrete bunker that hovers behind Tubman, attempting to eclipse her. This building is infamous. In 1957, over 4,000 people, led by Malcolm X, surrounded it to demand release of Johnson Hinton, a Nation of Islam member brutalized by police who later required multiple brain surgeries. Spike Lee famously dramatized this scene in his 1992 biopic. In 1964, amidst uprisings sparked by the murder of 15-year-old James Powell by police, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized a rally outside the precinct and were met with violence. Last week, converging with the Combahee Raid anniversary, crowds gathered once again outside of the precinct to protest murders of Black people by police and state-emboldened vigilantes: Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor — who should have celebrated her 27th birthday on Friday — and George Floyd, publicly executed over a $20 bill. People flooded the streets in all 50 states to protest the continuous targeting of Black life, and were met by curfews in at least 200 cities and even more police violence, particularly in New York City.
When you slowly circle the statue to focus more carefully on the intricate network of roots trailing from Tubman’s skirt toward the precinct, questions arise: Are they pulling her back, continuing to tether her descendants to the edifice of policing, surveillance, incarceration, and state violence that epitomizes what scholar Saidiya Hartman calls “the afterlife of slavery”? Or do they represent Tubman’s initiation of a gradual, but ongoing uprooting of the carceral, white supremacist foundations of the nation?
““Abolition requires us to ask: what would safety look like in a society that does not rely on the organized violence of policing and prisons? It requires us to build life-affirming alternatives that focus on meeting people’s needs as a strategy for reducing harm, rather than punishing them.” ”
Swing Low’s content and location provide a perfect visual metaphor for the contemporary abolitionist imperative, brought into stark relief by the most recent wave of police murders. The juxtaposition of Tubman, a quintessential abolitionist, with NYPD’s 28th precinct illustrates a through-line from her fugitive insurgency to today’s movement for the abolition of policing and prisons, also led by visionary Black women. National grassroots organization Critical Resistance defines “abolition” as “a political vision with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment.” Abolitionists argue that, rather than addressing the underlying issues that give rise to social problems like intimate violence, substance abuse, and homelessness, policing and imprisonment simply meets these problems with more violence from the state. This not only leaves problems unsolved, but actually reproduces and exacerbates them. As noted in a recent NY Times profile of abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, the term “abolition” is “an intentional echo of the movement to abolish slavery.” Policing in many states can be traced to slave patrols and links between mass incarceration and slavery have become a touchpoint of national discourse in the wake of the popularity of Ava Duvernay’s film, 13th, and Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow. But, rather than just analogy, Gilmore, Mariame Kaba, and other abolitionists aim to make a more crucial conceptual link in their strategic use of the term “abolition.” That link is radical imagination. The imagination and action that was required for Harriet Tubman and countless others to envision and make a world without chattel slavery while living in a time when the entire social and economic order depended on it is at least as daring as what it would take for us to create a world that does not rely on policing and imprisonment now. Just as effects of slavery did not vanish with emancipation, abolition now will not be accomplished by simply ending policing or closing prisons. Abolition requires us to ask what would safety look like in a society that does not rely on the organized violence of policing and prisons? It requires us to build life-affirming alternatives that focus on meeting people’s needs as a strategy for reducing harm, rather than punishing them. Angela Davis, author of germinal abolitionist text Are Prisons Obsolete? argues that Black feminists are uniquely positioned to lead this visionary work. She told the NY Times, “historically, Black feminists have had visions to change the structure of society in ways that would benefit not just Black women but everyone.” These visions require eschewing myopic analyses and emphasizing intersections between categories and struggles, what Davis calls “abolition feminism.” Abolitionists insist, for example, that safety must be thought about in relation to food and housing provision or that eliminating gender violence is inseparable from eliminating racism and economic inequality. In short, abolition requires Angela Davis’s oft-cited definition of radicalism: “grasping things at the root.”
Photo of Harriet Tubman Memorial, Swing Low, in Harlem via denisbin on Flickr.
It is no coincidence that these roots form the focal point of Alison Saar’s Harriet Tubman memorial. Saar hails from a family of artists. Her mother, Betye Saar, was a central figure in the Black arts movement whose celebrated 1972 work “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima” transformed a mammy figure into a Black Power icon. Inheriting this legacy, Alison Saar's work explores race, gender, and the power of women, often depicting Black women in ways that challenge viewers’ preconceptions. She is aware of the ability of public art to shape public discourse, collective imagination, and action. When asked in a recent interview to name an accomplishment she is particularly proud of, Saar names the Harlem memorial, describing it as “a place where people congregate not only to celebrate Harriet but also to rally for social causes.” She made controversial choices in Swing Low that were initially criticized. In the sculpture, Tubman, most known for multiple expeditions guiding enslaved people to free states in the North, is depicted mid-stride, moving resolutely due South. When it was unveiled in 2008, a petition to have the statue reoriented toward the North was signed by over 1,000 Harlem residents. Saar celebrated the dialogue her art generated and explained that she intentionally depicted Tubman heading South to emphasize her devotion to people that were still enslaved. While Tubman’s unbowed presence in front of a police fortress communicates defiance, she is also curiously missing the legendary firearm that forms the focal point of many artistic depictions of her. For some, this raises questions about the limits of state-commissioned portrayals of Black figures. Art historian Renée Ater has speculated that the gun may have been deliberately omitted due to the statue’s proximity to an NYPD precinct in a Black community with a troubled history of policing. Ater asks, “What would it have meant to have a statue of an armed Black woman in such a prominent public space?”
A woodcut image of Harriet Tubman from Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman by Sarah H Bradford (1869); image is in the public domain in the United States.
I read a bold message in Saar’s choices, one planted right into the Harlem landscape in plain sight of the police. Roots, often perceived as static or fixed, are incredibly dynamic. As a child, I was fascinated by how the roots of trees could even upend concrete. I would roam the uneven sidewalks of my neighborhood surveying the many places where undergrowth had pushed up entire slabs of pavement. Over time, as roots expand and strengthen, they find their way through existing cracks and enlarge them. They can move and shift the very ground we trod on, making it buckle and crack. Roots can compromise the foundations of even the sturdiest structures.
Simply removing Tubman’s gun would never succeed in disarming her. She remains “an armed Black woman in a prominent public space.” Rather, Saar focuses attention on the more lethal weapon that this “madwoman” wielded in her lifetime to subvert the social order: a radical imagination that exposed and grasped at the roots of slavery. Today, Tubman stands tall in Harlem with her back to the police. The strong rope-like roots that she sewed reach toward the precinct, promising to compromise its entire foundation. The gradual uprooting she helped initiate is carried on in the work of a new generation Black feminist abolitionists (which includes women and men, both cis and trans, and non binary Black folks) working in coalitions like the Movement for Black Lives, who are asking what it would require for us to make another world and acting collectively on the ground to live this world into existence.
Putting radical imagination into practice is no easy process. When she fixed her eyes and her actions on freedom, even Tubman did not know exactly what a world without slavery would look like. Unfreedom felt more familiar. In Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, a biography published in 1869, she told author Sarah Bradford of her arrival in Philadelphia,
“I had crossed the line. I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land; and my home, after all, was down in Maryland; because my father, my mother, my brothers, and sisters, and friends were there. But I was free, and they should be free. I would make a home in the North and bring them there.”
Instead of retreating to what she knew, she committed to making the world anew, turning that new world into a home, and bringing her people with her. Similarly, a world that relies on the organized violence of policing and imprisonment to address the violence caused by inequality and unmet needs feels so familiar to us now, but we must not mistake familiarity for freedom or for safety. We know that policing and prisons have not made any of us safer, and, for Black people in particular, they have stolen lives and dreams from us for generations. A world without policing is possible and already on the way, but making it into a home requires that we take leaps of imagination, commit to sustained work, and keep “grasping at the roots.”
Pre-Order The Storytellers Issue with Issa Rae
Our founders sit down with the actress, writer and producer extraordinaire to discuss the latest season of Insecure, the importance of telling our own stories, entrepreneurship and more. Shipping in June.
Cover image: Photo of Harriet Tubman Memorial, Swing Low, in Harlem via denisbin on Flickr.
