Don, Audible, and City of Newark Unveil Harriet Tubman Monument

On March 9th, 2023, Don, Newark Mayor Ras J. Baraka, the City of Newark, Queen Latifah, and Audible joined together to unveil Newark’s new monument honoring Harriet Tubman and her legacy, as well as Newark’s role in the Underground Railroad and the Black liberation movement.

The monument, titled Shadow of a Face, was designed by New Jersey artist and architect Nina Cooke John and erected in Newark’s Harriet Tubman Square. The project was led by City of Newark Division of Arts and Cultural Affairs Director fayemi shakur.

Audible curated and produced an interactive audio experience at the monument, written by Newark native Pia Wilson and performed by Newark native Queen Latifah and a talented cast, consisting of seminal stories of Harriet Tubman’s life intertwined with narratives about the Underground Railroad and the history of free Black communities in New Jersey. Monumental: Harriet Tubman and Newark’s Liberation Movement is also now available for free to listeners around the world.

The permanent, in-person audio experience that is open to the community–which is Audible’s first-ever site-based installation–is the latest of many neighborhood investments Audible has made to create a vibrant, 24/7 streetscape that celebrates the collective success of Newark. The installation is a marriage of Audible’s commitment to Newark and its commitment as a storytelling company, to amplify underrepresented voices.

Watch Don’s remarks above, or read the full transcript here:

Thank you and welcome everyone.

I talked to Nina Cooke John the other day.

It was such a pleasure to hear her describe her vision and purpose, as she designed the monument and helped shepherd it through fabrication. I heard that each of the artists and artisans building their respective parts of the structure said they had never been more challenged to create at this level. 

And Nina talked about the role and responsibility of public art, and its capacity to bring people together, which to Nina meant that in approaching an American superhero like Harriet Tubman, someone who lived a real life rife with courageous struggle over much of a century, the experience for visitors needed to speak to them and their own lives.

I immediately thought how my mentor, Ralph Ellison, would have admired Nina’s effort to humanize and go deep into Tubman’s complex realities. In many ways, Audible is the house that Ralph built, because it was his beliefs about the suppressed realities of the oral and vernacular storytelling traditions that inspired Audible’s effort to buck a calcified literary status quo and propel the power and the music in well composed and artfully performed words into the media mainstream.

Ralph taught me that our early cultural gatekeepers like Ben Franklin and Noah Webster did not want the “linguistic vernacular” of the way Americans told stories and bragged and lamented in the fields to disrupt the text-based culture of England.

Harriet Tubman could only live in the world of real American storytelling because she could not read or write.

She was also someone who would not accept the world as it was.

She followed her vision of what ought to be across a rich life full of experiences well beyond shepherding her family and others to freedom.

I think that the physical honoring of Ralph Ellison inside this Innovation Cathedral and Nina’s powerful monument a stone’s though away in the park tell profound stories.

Audible came to embrace Newark without any government incentives 16 years ago.

I believe Audible is a better business, a better place to work, and a better service giving voice to those who ought to have a voice, because of principles that call for something better.

Audible’s programmatic efforts have endeavored to give unfairly deprived people a chance, to help fight against the dire health and education and social justice outcomes, that are the all-too-pervasive results of asset and income disparities in Newark and other cities.

“Shadow of a Face” is just one step forward toward a fully renovated park and there is more work to be done.  I hope that a fully fitted out Tubman Square draws company workers – including Audible’s – back to resume a Newark Renaissance set back by COVID in ways that unequally hammered residents of too many New Jersey cities with challenges similar to Newark’s.

Newark Venture Partners was founded to nurture vibrant new companies that can draw the amazing Newark-born and educated talent back to be part of a better future. 

It was nine years ago that I sat between Rutgers-Newark Chancellor, Nancy Cantor, and another mentor and Newark icon, the late Clement Price, at commencement ceremonies as one first-generation degree-getter after another, from every background imaginable, walked by. 

I said to Nancy and Clem, “These folks will go out from here and create vast potentially redistributable wealth. We have to create more reasons for them to stay.” And this became a guiding vision of the possible for Newark Venture Partners. 

Thank you to so many Audible people and our allies who worked to give voice to the monument. 

 And speaking of allies; speaking of voices that have marked the soundscape of the culture by force of so much talent and charismatic presence, it is now my pleasure to introduce Queen Latifah, one of the voices you will hear emanating from the monument.

In the fall of 2019, I was able to spend time in California and then here at the Cathedral with Dana Owens (Queen Latifah), and her business and creative partner, the talented Shakim Compere. 

Talk about someone who has challenged the status quo and worked Harriet Tubman-hard to go where others don’t go.

 Many people possessed of Dana’s raw talent were expected to stay in a prescribed artistic lane, but Queen Latifah has made her mark within artistic formats and across them as few others have.

Dana did not accept the world as it was, and she acted upon this versus issuing statements.

Listen to the message in the rap song “U.N.I.T.Y.” from 1993. Or check out the money she raised hosting AIDS dance marathons in the 1990s.

Or have a binge evening watching Living Single or Life Support or her own productions – and you will see multicultural bosses and actors driving the productions and the messages.

Dana, welcome back to Audible, and take it away.