Why Is Harriet Tubman Facing South?

Why Is Harriet Tubman Facing South?

By Timothy Williams

Alison Saar’s statue of Harriet Tubman is being unveiled at 1 p.m. Thursday. (Photo: G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times)

Updated, 3:36 p.m. | A new 10-foot-tall bronze statue of Harriet Tubman in Harlem, part of a $2.8 million project, is being formally dedicated by the city at 1 p.m. on Thursday, but the work has confounded some observers because Tubman appears to be striding determinedly south, rather than heading north toward freedom.

The blog Uptown Flavor asked why the statue faces south and generated strong responses from readers who said the decision reflected ignorance or intellectual laziness. A viewer on the Web site for Current, a user-generated television and video network, asked of the statue, “Was it mounted wrong?”

Jacob Morris, director of the non-profit Harlem Historical Society, said neighbors were so upset about the south-facing statue that there is a petition with 1,000 signatures calling for the city to reverse her field of vision. “We are serious,” he said. “We hate what they did. It is just an outrage.”

Tubman (1822-1913), a runaway slave and conductor of the Underground Railroad who was called Moses by the people she helped free during her trips between the South and the North, also supported women’s right to vote. Her nighttime missions, with the North Star as a guide, started in the slaveholding state of Maryland and typically ended in Canada.

So why does the new two-ton statue of Tubman — her sense of purpose so strong that she pulls up roots as she walks along — have her facing south?

“She’s best known for her sojourns north,” said Alison Saar, the sculptor of the work, titled “Swing Low,” “but what is most impressive to me are her trips south, where she risked her own freedom.”

“As impressive as her courage and commitment was, what is amazing to me is her compassion,” said Ms. Saar, 52. “Harriet Tubman is calling on all of us to look at the compassion within each of us.”

An alternate view of the Tubman statue, titled “Swing Low.” (Photo: Tom Leeser)

Kate Clifford Larson, a biographer of Tubman and a historian at Simmons College in Boston, said she was unaware that the statue was facing south, but said it was in no way inaccurate to position her that way.

“I can see why people might get all wound up about it, but I don’t see anything wrong with it,” said Dr. Larson, author of “Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero” (Ballantine Books, 2003).

“I think it’s a real interesting take on it, because she wasn’t staying north like a lot of runaways did,” Dr. Larson said. “And really, that’s the point of the whole story.”

Ms. Saar, Dr. Larson said, had done a “brave thing.”

The statue is in the new Harriet Tubman Memorial Plaza, at the intersection of Frederick Douglass Boulevard, St. Nicholas Avenue and 122nd Street, a formerly barren traffic triangle. Designed by Quennell Rothschild & Partners and constructed by URS, the triangle contains plantings native to New York and Tubman’s home state of Maryland.

Mr. Morris, of the Harlem Historical Society, did not buy it. He said he did not believe Ms. Tubman was facing south due to artistic inspiration, but rather because the traffic triangle faces south. “It violates the historical integrity of everything Harriet Tubman stands for,” he said of the placement of the statue.

Several city officials — the cultural affairs commissioner, Kate D. Levin; the parks commissioner, Adrian Benepe; the transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan; the design and construction commissioner, David J. Burney; and Representative Charles B. Rangel — are scheduled to join descendants of Tubman, Ms. Saar and Christopher Moore, a curator at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, for the dedication ceremony.