Follow the North Star
Freedom in the Age of Mobility
Throughout African American history, ‘freedom’ has been a highly pursued destination. The search for ‘promised lands’ —real and imagined —has taken many forms, from travel to places found on maps to places elsewhere manifested in our minds. Inspired by the lifesaving, hope-filled instructions to “follow the North Star” given to freedom seekers escaping slavery by way of the Underground Railroad, Follow the North Star: Freedom in the Age of Mobility explores the multifaceted journey of Black liberation through movement.
The idea of liberation through mobility has persisted throughout African American history because freedom and movement are closely intertwined. The ability to go and come, travel, migrate, return, and use one’s bodily motions in performances and sports all embody the freedom of movement. Even those who cannot or choose not to exercise mobility are part of this story because movement is not merely physical. Movement is political, spiritual, social, and cultural. Thus, remaining unmovable can also be powerful.
Follow the North Star explores the concept of mobility, literally, figuratively, and metaphysically, investigating stories as diverse as mass migration movements, pursuits of bodily autonomy such as transportation, sport, and dance, and the cultivation and preservation of spiritual and mythological spaces of freedom. Mobility is not simply the freedom to move around on planes, trains, and automobiles. It is the freedom to pursue one’s destiny in all forms.
But freedom has also proven elusive; even at the journey’s end, African Americans often found different challenges in the new locations and arenas they pioneered. Still, they adapted, organized, and transformed their new homes, modes of travel, and ways of life. In turn, they also transformed what it meant to be African American wherever they were and however they arrived. From recurring Back-to-Africa movements to the famed Montgomery Bus Boycotts to Afrofuturist visions of other worlds and more, the African American journey is a complex story of possibility and agency.
