Dedicated at a community-wide celebration on June 20, 1999, these two powerful statues by African American women sculptors stand as a testament to the African American drive for freedom. Although Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (1877-1968) completed Emancipation in 1913 on the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, it was not cast in bronze until it was selected to be placed at Harriet Tubman Square. Instead of showing the paternalism of a white president freeing enslaved people, Fuller presented the freedman and freedwoman as active agents moving out of slavery into the world. Fuller was a community activist herself in addition to being a sculptor. She married Solomon Carter Fuller, America’s first African American psychiatrist in 1909.
In Step on Board, Boston-based Fern Cunningham (1949-2020) shows both the power and compassion of Harriet Tubman (1822-1913), the most famous “conductor” on the Underground Railroad. Among Cunningham’s other public sculptures in Boston are Earth Challengers at the Joseph Lee School in Dorchester, Sentinel in the Forest Hills Cemetery, and Rise in Mattapan Square.
