Philly ‘walking artist’ was on the road again, tracing freedom sites from Harpers Ferry to Gettysburg

If Harpers Ferry is the starting point for a walk commemorating the Black freedom struggle in the United States, one might assume the intent was to call attention to abolitionist John Brown’s infamous raid on the U.S. military arsenal there in 1859.

But you would be wrong.

Ken Johnston, the Philadelphia walking artist who completed a walk to Canada last year following Underground Railroad routes used to help enslaved people escape to freedom, said his current walk — just completed Wednesday — from Harpers Ferry, W.Va. to Gettysburg, Pa., wasn’t focused on John Brown.

Last September, Johnston walked to St. Catharines, Ontario, in Canada, where Harriet Tubman once lived, to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Tubman’s birth.

That walk was the completion of a walk he had begun in December 2019 from the Eastern Shore of Maryland to Philadelphia. He later walked from Philadelphia to New York. And in July 2022, he set out to walk the last 450-mile stretch from Harlem to Canada.

Once he reached Canada, Johnston said, one of his hosts there drove him to where W.E.B. Du Bois and the other men who were part of the Niagara Movement held their first meeting on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls in 1905.

The Niagara Movement leaders met to create an organization to demand civil and political rights for Black people, and it was a forerunner of the NAACP, or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

“What inspired me to go to Harpers Ferry [this year] is that in Canada, someone told me that the second Niagara Movement meeting was held at Storer College, a traditionally Black college in Harpers Ferry,” Johnston said.

That second Niagara Movement meeting, at Storer College in 1906, was the first held on American soil.

“We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a freeborn American, political, civil and social,” DuBois said while speaking at the 1906 Niagara Movement meeting at Storer College.

Records show the Niagara Movement members chose Storer because of its historic significance as the site of Brown’s anti-slavery raid in 1859 — and because the school had been founded with a mission to educate people of all races, including formerly enslaved people.

The college was shuttered in 1955, one year after the Brown v. Board of Education decision that ruled segregated schools were unconstitutional.

Johnston, 62, who lives in Cobbs Creek in West Philadelphia, said he got a ride to Harpers Ferry last Tuesday, where he met with 85-year-old Delores Jackson Foster. She grew up playing on the Storer College campus because her mother had been a cook there.

The most recent walk, named “We Still Here,” after a mural featuring Philadelphia poet Ursula Rucker, was intended to tell the stories of Black struggle south of the Mason-Dixon line.

He said people in this region often gave support to “freedom seekers,” or those escaping enslavement, even though there may not have been an organized Underground Railroad system.

After spending some time at Storer, he began the approximately 80-mile walk from Harpers Ferry to Gettysburg last Thursday.

Along the way, he stopped on Sunday, for the Maryland Iron Festival hosted by the Catoctin Furnace Historical Society not far from Frederick. The furnace, which opened as early as 1775, was ready to operate in time to produce cannon balls for George Washington in the Revolutionary War.

The site was significant for Black people because about 271 enslaved Black Americans made up the bulk of its workforce in its early years, until the furnace owner decided he could save more money by hiring recent European immigrants, Johnston said. “The furnace owner did not have to feed and clothe the new immigrants.”

Johnston said the walk from Harpers Ferry to Gettysburg, where he arrived about 11:30 a.m. Wednesday was the fourth walk he’s conducted to seek to tell the stories of Black people’s struggle for civil and political rights.

“The hills and valleys bordering South-Central Pennsylvania ... resonate with the untold hidden stories of Black life past and present.”

“During my walk, I discovered the hills and valleys bordering South-Central Pennsylvania and Western Maryland, above and below the Mason-Dixon line, continue to resonate with the untold hidden stories of Black life past and present,” he said late Tuesday.

From Frederick Johnston said he walked, following the path of the old Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, to Hagerstown, Md., which had a reputation for being particularly hard for enslaved people.

In Hagerstown, he visited the Doleman Black Heritage Museum. Hagerstown was a noted regional market for the sale of enslaved people, “and a Mecca for slave catchers due to the close proximity to Pennsylvania and freedom to the north via the C and O Canal,” according to the Washington County (Md.) public library.

The Doleman Black Heritage Museum is currently located inside a public building. However, the museum recently began a $23 million campaign to repair a building it has purchased as its future home.

When he arrived in Gettysburg Wednesday morning, Johnston said he felt conflicted by the history there. “I want to pay homage to all the young men who died here, and yet I am unhappy with some of the history that followed the end of the [Civil] War, the end of slavery and the country’s embrace of Jim Crow and segregation,” he said.

As he walked south of the Mason-Dixon line, Johnston said he has not come across people who want to ban or ignore the history of Black Americans.

“The whole idea of book banning and shutting down history is not what I was discovering in communities like Harpers Ferry, Frederick, and Hagerstown,” he said.

“They are embracing the Black history and giving those communities the opportunity to tell their stories.”