Gateway to Freedom

A beautiful monument to the African community of freed slaves. I can’t imagine having to runaway to freedom in a country I’m not from. Having been imprisoned into slavery, then given a chance at freedom with death as a suitable punishment if caught. Wow. We need more great examples of history in Detroit.

It’s a statue by the river.

Adam T. (and others) looking for the Windsor installation of the International Memorial to the Underground Railroad.
You might expect that the Canadian monument would also be directly on the banks of the Detroit River in Windsor’s beautiful Riverfront Park. It is not!
It is about two blocks from the water at 200 Pitt Street East (near the Windsor Casino).

(This is not an art gallery, but there was no category for public art. I think that this is a must see for people visiting Detroit though, so I squeezed it into a category that doesn’t really fit.)
I am a not Detroiter, but I have had to spend about three weeks there over the past year and half. I have really grown to like a number of things about the city, including its grit, character, history, and some of its architecture. One of things that I love is the public art by the waterfront. The two monuments — Gateway to Freedom and Michigan Labor Legacy — are imbued with history and celebrate struggles for justice. The Gateway to Freedom Memorial is sculpture of six fugitive slaves looking across the Detroit River, the last obstacle that they have to cross before finding freedom in Canada. It celebrates the history of blacks and whites who participated in the Underground Railroad. Maps showing the locations of safehouses in Detroit and greater Michigan are incorporated into the sculpture, as is a map that shows runaway slaves migration routes from the South to the North. The monument also explains some of the symbolism of coded quilts (deciphering two patterns as example), which runaways used as a resource for information when traveling through potentially hostile territory. There is a «sister» monument in Windsor, which I think shows a group welcoming the fugitives or encouraging them to cross the river. It is a very cool concept for a transnational monument. I, however, have tried to find the sister monument in Windsor twice with no success. (Perhaps, the third time will be the charm.)
I thought the fact that local Detroiters still stopped by the monument several years after its construction spoke to its power.